Partitioning for HFS+ and NTFS on same external USB drive

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I have a MacBook Pro (OS 10.5) running VMWare Fusion on my BootCamp partition. I am trying to use iPartition to divide an external USB drive into an HFS+ partition for use in the Mac environment and a FAT32 one for use in the Windows environment (which I would subsequently format as NTFS once in Windows). When I do this with iPartition, both partitions (HFS+ and FAT32) show up on the Mac side but when I switch to the Windows side only the HFS+ partition shows up (I also have MacDrive installed). The windows (FAT32) partition doesn't show up.:Angry:

How can I partition my external drive so that both Mac and Windows environments see both partitions? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
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Try using the built in Disk Utility instead of iPartition. It's quite easy to use and should do what you're looking for.

Also, I find it odd that Windows could see the HFS partition but not the FAT32 partition. Are you sure you don't mean it the other way around?
 
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Try using the built in Disk Utility instead of iPartition. It's quite easy to use and should do what you're looking for.

Also, I find it odd that Windows could see the HFS partition but not the FAT32 partition. Are you sure you don't mean it the other way around?

The problem with Disk Utility is that I'd have to erase everything currently on the external disk in the process of repartitioning it (iPartition preserves this data and just adds the new partition).

The reason Windows can see the HFS partition is that I have MacDrive installed which allows Windows computers to mount/read/write Mac disks.
 
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I stumbled across a way of making this work. As stated above, after I partitioned my external disk using iPartition, the FAT partition didn't show up in Windows explorer (i.e. My Computer). However, when I went into Disk Management (right clicking on My Computer, selecting Manage and then selecting Disk Management from the left hand pane) lo and behold the missing partition showed up (as well as the HFS partition and of course my internal HD). I then right-clicked on the FAT partition, selected Format and formatted this partition as NTFS. Eureka! The new partition now shows up in Windows explorer... and mission accomplished. Don't ask me why I had to go through these extra steps, but all's well that ends well :D
 
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Hmm, looks like iPartition created an empty partition rather than a FAT32 partition. Glad to hear you got it sorted out though :D
 
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How to put HFS+ and NTFS on the same Drive

I figured it out, and it's relatively easy to do. You can partition your drive without losing any data already stored on it. This works if you have a hard drive that's already set as NTFS. You need both Windows and Mac to do this.



1. Download the Windows program Acronis Disk Director. This program will partition your hard drive and keep all the files intact!

2. Connect your external drive to windows and open the program. Choose the drive you wish to partition.

3. Set the partition size to whatever you want and set the new partition to be blank with no set file system on it.

4. The program will partition the drive. My 1 TB drive only took about 25 minutes to partition.

5. Connect the external hard drive to Mac and open Disk Utility.

6. In Disk Utility select the blank partition you just created and click on erase. From there you can choose to create the volume format as Mac OS Extended.



That's it. It is not impossible and relatively easy to do!
 

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