07-12-2009, 04:09 AM

Hi,

I am dual booting Mac and Windows(through Bootcamp) on my Macbook.
I bought an External portable Drive recently.
I dont plan to use it with Time Machine. I only want to do manual Backup.
I decided to create three partitions:
1. 30 GB - FAT32
2. 30 GB - NTFS
3. 240 GB - HFS+

So, to make these partitions, I first used Disk Utility and created the following Partitions using GUID Partition Scheme(Not MBR):
1. 28.1 GB FAT32
2. 30.0 GB Free Space(Unformatted)
3. 240 GB Mac OS Extended(Journaled)

After that I could see the two mounted partitions 1 & 3 in both Disk Utility and Mac OSX Finder and was able to use them. The free Unformatted Space was not showing in Disk Utility.

Then I booted into Windows and created NTFS Partition from the 2nd Block of Free Unformatted Space, and was able to access both Partition 1 & 2 in Windows Explorer.

Now after I boot back into Mac, I see that the NTFS Partition is not showing up in Finder. It is also not showing in Disk Utility.

Here are screenshots of the Disk Partition in OSX Disk Utility and Windows Disk Management:


So, in short there are 3 things I want to ask:
1. Why is Free Unformatted Space not showing in Mac Disk Utility(See below screenshots)?
2. Why is the Windows Formatted NTFS also not showing up?
Could the above be due to GUID Partition scheme I used ?
3. What is the last 126 MB Space showing at the end in Windows Disk Manager For?




Please help me with these questions of mine...

07-12-2009, 04:51 AM

Try formatting the drive on windows as 3 FAT partitions. Someone at macoshints has seemed to it it working that way, I would also try having the HFS partition first

macosxhints.com - Create an HFS+/NTFS/FAT32 external drive

07-12-2009, 06:24 AM

Originally Posted by louishen

Try formatting the drive on windows as 3 FAT partitions. Someone at macoshints has seemed to it it working that way, I would also try having the HFS partition first

macosxhints.com - Create an HFS+/NTFS/FAT32 external drive

I got the NTFS to show up in OSX.
Creating partitions in Mac did not matter.
Unchecking the Quick Format checkbox when creating partition did the trick(even though it took long time for Full Format).
Also realized that GUID Partition Scheme does take away 200MB at beginning of Disk and 128 MB after HFS Partition.

Is GUID good, or shoud I revert to the same old MBR partitioning?

07-12-2009, 06:46 AM

All partition schmes take a bit of space out for the partition tables.

I would say, ifs its working now, leave it be