Patitioning an External HD

hey I just recently got my first mac, which was a macbook. I used to have a windows pc desktop. I took one of the HDs out and bought one of those enclosures to put the HD in. I then hooked it up to my macbook via USB and everything works great. The Only problem is that since the HD's filesystem is NTFS, the drive is read only on my Mac.

I was wondering if there was some way i could partition the HD to be read on both Mac and Windows aside from having two seperate partitions.

Also, I was thiknin about installing XP and running bootcamp on this HD, is that possible, booting from an external HD i mean?

Anytime i start up the Macbook with the External drive engaged and powered up, it just plays the Mac chime a number of times but never actually starts up. Any suggestions??

I apologize in adavnce if these are repeat posts.

Thank you

Go to applications-> utilities -> disk utilities and format the drive to HFS+ journaled. Then I think if you buy MacDrive and install it on your windows machine, it should be able to read the drive. Or i think you could always format it to FAT32, because OS X can read and write to that partition, only thing is that FAT32 is outdated and it sucks. So go for the former advice.

As for the chime when you start it up, I have no clue. But I did the same thing just to let you know, dug a 120gb seagate drive out of an idle windows machine and bought a macally enclosure for it, but it's firewire. So i don't think you can boot the Operating System from a USB enclosure, only firewire. But someone correct me if I'm wrong. I hope I was of help.

Check out macdrive- http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/

Do some research. I'm a mac newb too, so excuse the plethora of "I thinks" in my post- I just switched in January