07-19-2007, 03:59 AM

Hey everyone

What i would like to do is take my 250gb external HDD and partition it with 125Gb going to NTFS and 125Gb going to the mac file format

What would people suggest as being the quickest and easiest way to achieve this?

Its only because I want to use the drive on both my windoze box and my mac, yet I do use files larger then 4gb which rules out fat32.

~~ TS ~~

07-19-2007, 05:33 AM

If you can live with "HFS+ - read only" feature, you can try this. That way you can avoid partitioning the HDD.

07-19-2007, 07:16 AM

You can't have 2 separate file formats on one physical drive.

You can only have 2 HFS+ or 2 NTFS, mixing and matching is not possible.

07-19-2007, 07:17 AM

Haven't found a partition manager that will format in both NTFS and HFS+ myself.
Instead, ended up springing for MacDrive - for extra $10 you can get 2 licenses, then you'll be able to read and write to HFS+ from XP in both BootCamp and your windows desktop machine.

Maybe with OS X's disc utility you can't partition drives in multiple formats (don't know since I haven't tried it myself), but you sure can with other OS's including windows and every version of Linux/BSD I've ever installed. Currently have one drive on my desktop machine with partitions in at least 4 formats including FAT32, NTFS, Ext3 and ReiserFS along with a 5th Linux swap partition. And it is possible, as Boot Camp itself creates a 2nd partition on your internal drive and allows you to format it with either FAT32 or NTFS while maintaing HFS+ on your OS X partition.

For us non-coders, we just need someone to provide us the tool to do it. Maybe with so many putting windows on their Mac's, Acronis will get with the program and implement HFS support at some point.

Maybe as often as this question is being asked nowadays - I may go get myself another cheap external enclosure and throw one of my old drives in it to experiment.

07-19-2007, 09:11 AM

Well I'm an idiot!

I just checked and it does seem to be possible with Disk utility after all. You can select different formats for each partition you select:




I could have sworn I'd tried it a while back when I got my external drive and wasn't able to...

Oh well - sorry about the FUD there!

07-19-2007, 05:54 PM

We all do it, no worry apt.
But, there still have been several asking about putting NTFS on one partition and HFS+ on the other with external drives and haven't seen a real way to do this.

Not gonna try it with my existing external and don't have a spare right now - but TS, my first thinking would be to connect the drive to a windows box and use windows disc manager to partition the drive and format the single partition you want as NTFS. Then move the drive to your Mac and use disc utitlity to format the 2nd partition. If this works post back and let us know.

07-20-2007, 04:04 AM

Hey everyone

Im going to give it a go in about an hour or so, ill post back with the results

~~ TS ~~

07-20-2007, 05:00 AM

Well its worked

Firstly i put the external HDD connected to my windows machine and used the manage console to format half of the drive to the NTFS format.

I then connected it to my mac and opened up disc utilities and clicked on "Freespace" and asked it to format that to journaled...

And it works ^_^

Thanks everyone for your help!

~~ TS ~~

07-20-2007, 07:23 AM

Great TS.
At least now we have a method we know works. I think this had been asked a half dozen times just in the last month or so.

Post back after you've been using the drive for a time. Am curious as to your uses. Will you be using this drive only to back up each of your systems or using it to exchange data between them? If the latter, what type of inconveniences you run into vs going ahead and dropping the $50 for MacDrive.

08-17-2007, 10:23 AM

hey guys. im trying to use acronis to back up my new macbook's HD before i fill it w/crap. i can't get acronis bootable to work though. i press "c" to boot from CDrom. it goes into the acronis recovery manager and then hangs! help!