Partitioning an External HD

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I just got home from picking up a Lacie 250gb Firewire 800 Drive. I am pleasantly surprised that the thing worked right out of the box with OSX. What I want to do though, is partition 50GB to be used with my bootcamp Windows, leaving OSX with 200GB. Any idea how I would do this?
 
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I just got home from picking up a Lacie 250gb Firewire 800 Drive. I am pleasantly surprised that the thing worked right out of the box with OSX. What I want to do though, is partition 50GB to be used with my bootcamp Windows, leaving OSX with 200GB. Any idea how I would do this?

Goto /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility

Select the Drive you want to partition in the Left Column (make sure to pick the right one), then in the little tabs, go to partition, then there is a drop down, that will give the option for the number of partitions. Set it to 2.

Now name each partition accordingly, and size them by dragging the little separator bar up and down, then click 'Partition' near the bottom of the window.

Should only take a few seconds. Any data already on the drive will be lost.

Brian
 
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When I go to disk utility and click on the Lacie HD, the only tabs I have are first aid, erase, RAID, and Restore. As far as I can tell, there is no partition option there at all.
 
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In Disc Utility click on the Drive icon itself, not the current partition icon. It'll be the upper of the two icons for that drive. When you do that the Partition tab shows up at the top.
 
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are you wanting to install bootcamp on the External? AFAIK you cannot do that. Your bootcamp partition has to be on the internal.
 
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Yes, Windows insists on being installed into the first partition of the first hard drive. Not very flexible! Typical Microsoft.

However, perhaps BootCamp fools MS into *thinking* that it is on the first partition, even if it is not?

Either way, it needs to be on the internal hard drive.
 
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I already have windows on my macbook pro HD, but I would like to have a section of the external be used by my windows under bootcamp. Is this possible. Thanks for the replies.
 
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Certainly. If you just want Windows to be able to use it, create a FAT32 partition on the external and all will be well. Both the Mac and Windows will be able to read and write the FAT32 partition. Only the Mac will even know that the HFS+ Mac partition exists.
 
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Ok, I found out where to partition it, but when I go to click partition, i get an error stating "Could not unmount disk". Anyone know a fix for this? Also, I dont see an option to create a fat32 in the format type.
 
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You can simply highlight the disc as you are and click the "unmount" button at the top of Disc Utility window. FAT-32 is disguised a "MS-DOS" format in Disc Utility.
 
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Ok, I successfully partitioned the drive in Mac OSX, but I cant see the other partition in Windows. When I connect the drive in windows, i get that sound that lets you know something is connected, but I see no drive in "My Computer". Anyone know what I am doing wrong?
 
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You can't see any partition or the Mac partition. Windows won't see the Mac partition at all.
 
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I can see both in Mac OS X, but neither in Windows. As far as I know, the windows partition is formatted in MS-DOS.
 

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