Sharing a h/d osx and xp

I'm running osx and xp on my mac pro very successfully so far. It would be great for me to have a hard disk shared bewtween the two os's though, by that I mean not one physical hard disk with two partitions, but one hard disk that both os's can read and write to. I want to use NTFS for windows, but mac osx can only read this, and if I were to use FAT 32 instead I'm limited to only 32gb partitions (please correct me If im wrong there, but im sure thats right). Is there a format that both os's can read and write? I reckon with osx being able to read ntfs it must be a very small step for it to be able to write it - is there a hack to make this possible?

Hope someone can help me out, and sorry if this has been posted before but I couldn't find anything when I searched the site!

You are only limited to 32GB if you use windows XP or 2000 to create the partition. OS X can create much larger FAT32 partitions. It seems to be an arbitrary limitation microsoft introduced to get people to move over to NTFS.


So my advice would be create the XP partition with FAT32. That way you can access all your windows files from your mac.

If you want windows to be able to access your mac's HFS+ partition, check out Macdrive from mediafour.

Are you sure there? I'm sure when creating the windows partition in mac osx with bootcamp it was only alowing me up to 32gb, or is that something different? Sorry I'm not at a mac at the mo!

It will only allow you to repartition the amount of free space left+ 5GB of additional room for OS X. So if you have 50GB free, you can assign a maximum of 45GB to windows.

But otherwise there aren't any limitations.