Partition external hard drive?

not sure if this is posted in the right section, but i couldnt decide which section is should be in and im new to mac so i though i would stick it here

I was wondering whether it is possible to partition a hard drive in order to have windows running on one partition so that on the odd occasion i need to use a windows based program i can just use that, while retaining the other partition to use for time machine and general use?

I hope that made sense and hopefully somebody has an answer or a more simple way of going about this (i know its possible to install parrallels on mac machines, but i dont want to waste any internal memory on my macbook)

Thanks in advance for the helo guys and girls!

Yorange,

If you want to run Windows at all on your Mac, you'll have to either install it in Boot camp or on a Virtual machine like Parallels or Fusion. You cannot put Windows on an external drive and run it on your Mac, sorry.

But it's quite simple to install Windows on the Mac itself. You'll just have to have a retail copy to do that. Check out the Boot Camp Assistant (user name/Applications/Utilities/Boot Camp Assistant.app) and on the opening page there's a pdf file you can read or print to see what's involved. If you decide to use a VM instead, you can check out Parallels or Fusion - and I believe there are free trails if you want to check them out.

If you're worried about hard drive space, they don't take up that much, 32GB is about the most you would want to use, but 10-20GB ought to do it...

Noel

Thanks for the help, i will look into both and see which makes more sense for me to use, after all i really am only looking at running one or two windows based programs,