Partitioning external Western Digital HD

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Hello experts,

I bought a Western Digital external HD, 750 Gb, that originally came formatted FAT32 with one sole partition. With the drive connected to the iMac through the FireWire 400 door and following instructions of both Western Digital and DiskUtility I tried to create 3 partitions with 500 GB, 150 GB and the balance of 48.6 GB. After searching the forum I chose scheme GUID for the partitions and maintained FAT32 for the files. Once I agreed with the software to erase all HD and clicking OK, Disk Utility says I am not allowed to do such partitions.

Questions:

a) Did I do something wrong?
b) If I chose APM scheme for the partitions and HFS+ system for files, would I be able to transfer (copy and paste) FAT32 files from other HDs?

Thanks
 

chscag

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When partitioning the external HD, do not specify GUID. Just partition and format as MSDOS. That will yield three partitions formatted to FAT-32.

If you want to use one of those partitions (500 Gb) for backing up your Mac, it should be formatted to HFS+.

Any partition formatted to FAT-32 will be common to both OS X and Windows. In other words, you can transfer files and folders between both operating systems and\or machines. But keep in mind - FAT-32 file limitation is ~4 Gb so if you have large files (video, movies) they can not be stored on the drive.

Regards.
 

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