Creating a Partition for Music

I have my computer dual booted with XP and Leopard and I have around 28 GB of music and stuff that I love to play. Its on the Leopard part of my HD, as is just about everything besides a game or two on XP.

I have a Macbook Pro and use just an interal HD of like 260GB or so. Anyway is it possible to create a partition of like 30 GB for my music in a format that makes me able to play the music when I am on Leopard or XP? I hate not having any music when I am in Windows (I guess it could be my punishment for using XP on a mac )

So how can I do that, and is there a format that would make it readable by both?

Thanks

Well that will work if you do this. You make your bootcamp partition as you normally would and put all the music onto that. And set your itunes up so it reads the music folder from the partition. And it should work in Windows and OS X. The only catch is you have to make the partition fat (can be read and written to in Windows and OS X) format. And I think 32GB is the max that kind of partition can be.

the8thark said:

Well that will work if you do this. You make your bootcamp partition as you normally would and put all the music onto that. And set your itunes up so it reads the music folder from the partition. And it should work in Windows and OS X. The only catch is you have to make the partition fat (can be read and written to in Windows and OS X) format. And I think 32GB is the max that kind of partition can be.

Click to expand...

You can make the FAT 32 partition any size as long as you format it using the boot camp assistent. It's only Windows that has a size limitation for FAT32 partitions.

But bootcamp assistant only lets you create 1 extra partition? Or at least its trying to delete my XP partition before letting me partition it again? Anyway around this, or any other programs that would do the same?

do it yourself in terminal with the "disktutil resizeVolume" command

but for your own good read some documentation on this before you try it and backup everything

further clarification: you'll end up having to resize your mac partition and the new partition you create should be formatted as fat32. you could also download macfuse and the ntfs-3g driver and mount it as an ntfs volume, which would avoid all those problems with large file sizes

first you've got to find out what partition mac osx (probably disk0s2)

1) open terminal and type diskutil list
then you'll get something like this
/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *74.5 GB disk0
1: EFI 200.0 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS macbox 39.8 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_HFS shared 24.3 GB disk0s3
4: Microsoft Basic Data 10.0 GB disk0s4

Instead of "macbox" you should see "Macintosh HD" next to your osx partition. this is important because you need to know how disk space is available on that partition. you'll probably have something like 200.0 GB

2) then you need to decide what size partition you want to create, if you've got 200 GB on that partition and you want to set aside 30 GB for your music files, you'd do something like this

su diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 170G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Music" 30G

where "disk0s2" is the mountpoint
"170G" is the amount you want left on your mac osx partition
"MS-DOS FAT32" is the filesystem you'll use
"Music" is the name of the new partition
"30G" is the amount of space on your new partition

change the amounts where necessary, back up your hd, and seriously read some documentation on this before you try it

now that I think of it. you'll probably have to disable journaling before you do any of that. you can do it in disk utility or through diskutil

sudo diskutil disableJournal disk0s2

same thing to enable it when you're done

sudo diskutil enableJournal disk0s2

although it'll probably do that once you reset your computer which you should always do after messing with partition. did I mention to back up everything before you try this