Multiple Partitions On External Drive

Ok guys I have bought a external hard drive and now I would like to partition 100 GB for OS X and 10GB for XP and the rest just for general storage. My question is, can I use disk utility to format the external drive (to remove all that crappy backup software) by the way which format does disk utility format in MS-DOS mode, FAT32 right? Anyways, after formatting the drive, I'll partition 100 GB using HFS+ (journaled) for OS X. I would also like to boot from the drive in case of an emergency of something, so I guess I can, by pressing the option key I have an intel mac and usb external drive.

Thanks for reading.

Are you wanting to boot from the XP partition on the external drive as well? My understanding is that that's not supported. I have no idea why, since you can hold option when booting to boot off an external Mac OS partition. Must be something to do with the disk drivers loaded by the firmware or something. You can, of course, boot from a FAT32 partition on an internal drive.

In any case, I've not found a way to include both HFS and FAT32/NTFS on the same drive using Apple's Disk Utility. You can, however, partition and format your HFS+ partition and leave a 10GB partition unformatted. Hopefully XP's disk manager won't clobber the HFS partition if you use it to create a FAT32 partition on that previously unallocated space.

if you search here for this topic, you will find plenty of info. I just did this myself. You'll need another program for the XP version formating. I think MACFuse is one of them. You'll want something like superduper or carbon copy clone to make a the back ups. Disk utility will do everything else you want to do. BTW, you'll need some time, just zeroing out the drive could take a hour+.

I meant to say that I want to make a 110 GB partition (clone) for OS X, another for XP and another for general storage. Yes I want to boot up may mac, using the external drive, but no I do not want to boot up XP using the external drive, I will rarely be using XP anyways. That is what I meant. BTW for backing up XP I just want to manually back it up, some files here and there, I don't want a clone of XP, but I want a clone for OS X. I think that is a little clearer. Or is it cleared like mud? Should I use FAT32 or NTFS for the general storage partition? I would like OS X and XP to read and write it.