External HD with Three Partion Formats

External HD with Three Partition Formats

Hello, I have been searching around, and it seems that I cannot find my answer. I am wondering if I should be able to have three partitions for my external HD, one in NFTS for my PC, one in FAT32 to be able to share between my PC and soon to be coming Ibook, and one in HFS+ for the Ibook alone. I have been searching around and for whatever reason, the only threads I can seem to find say to do it in one of two methods; do it all in FAT32, or do FAT32 plus one of the others. This gives me the impression that this is not possible. I simply want to keep some of my files separate and use the most efficient format for the respective hardware. Also, I would also like to use the drive for some files larger than 4GB, and FAT32 doesn't allow for this. Thanks in advance.

Try opening Disk Utility and creating 3 HFS+ partitions of the sizes you want for each. Keep track of the correlation of size and type. (obviously) Then open Terminal and type:

diskutil list

This gets the names of those partitions that you just made. (usually something like disk0s3) Then type:

diskutil reformat MS-DOS "name of partition"

That should give you a FAT32 partition. Then type:

diskutil reformat NTFS "name of 2nd partition"

That should give you a NTFS partition. I'm not positive whether Terminal supports this file system though.

Then the 3rd one you can leave alone given it started out as HFS+.

That's how I would do it; if the hard-drive is already empty you might as well try. :mac:

Actually I think you could just do this after you get the name of the disk:

diskutil partitionDisk "name of disk" MBRFormat 3 HFS+ Mac_Partition 99G MS-DOS Windows_Partition 99G NTFS 99G

Once again, I'm not even sure if Macs can create NTFS partitions, but this command (if Macs can) would create 3 partitions, each 99GB (you can change that), and each a seperate filesystem. The "Mac_Partition" is the name of the partition and can be whatever you want it to be, like, "My_partition" (just remember to put an underscore_where_you_want_spaces) as is the FAT32. The "MBRformat" command makes the partition be DOS compatible.

Hope that helps.

Why even bother with the NTFS partition?

It's only slightly more efficient than Fat32, but will just cause you hassle with other OS's.

Just go with 1 partition if you're only saving data there, or 1 FAT32 & 1 HFS+ if you want to create a bootable backup for your mac.

Aptmunich said:

Why even bother with the NTFS partition?

It's only slightly more efficient than Fat32, but will just cause you hassle with other OS's.

Just go with 1 partition if you're only saving data there, or 1 FAT32 & 1 HFS+ if you want to create a bootable backup for your mac.

Click to expand...

I would like the NTFS partition because only my PC has a DVD burner, and I would like to have a scratch partion on my external HD. The DVD files will be larger than 4GB.

Are you using image files? Normally DVD's are comprised of mulitple VOB files that normally don't exceed the 4GB limit...

The DVDs aren't nessesarily commercial DVDs that split into multiple VOBs. I was thinking that if the Ibook diskutility cannot format NTFS, then would it work if I created two FAT32 partitions and then later used my PC to create the NTFS partition from one of the FAT32 partitions? Thanks

That should work as well...