External HDD

[disord3r]

I have an external drive on which I plan to have 2 partitions: an NTFS partition for XP/2K, and an HFS+ partition for OSX.

So far, I've connected the drive to my XP box, created a partition of 90% of the space, formatted, and all is well I can use that partition just fine. Now that I've connected it to my Mac, I'm not sure how to get other 10% partitioned for OSX.

When I immediately connected it, it told me that it didn't recognize it. No sweat - I've not yet partitioned it. It asked me if I wanted to initialize it, but to me that sounds a lot like "blow away the NTFS partition that I spent 45 minutes formatting", and I'm not cool with that. Even the disk utility gives me the impression that it will attempt to wipe out the NTFS partition as it is giving me the option of creating partitions far bigger than the 10% unallocated space that is actually there.

Dropped out to a terminal and issued fdisk as root and it tells me 'unable to access IDE or SCSI drive'. From this point, I'm not really sure what to do to preserve my NTFS partition and create a partition out of the remaining disk space.

Any suggestions? I'm running 10.2.8 if it makes any difference.

 

[disord3r]

This brings me to another question I had. What does OSX mean exactly when it wants to initialize the disk? This appears to be separate from the partitioning/formatting process, so I'm not really sure what it is. I just sorta ASSUMED that this would blow out my NTFS partition.

Also, does it make any difference whether I've done it this way or the opposite (let OSX create the 10% partition first and then do the 90% NTFS partition from my PC afterwards)?

Thank you.

 

[disord3r]

Just for kicks, I decided to initialize the disk under OSX, create the 10% partition (the other 90% I marked as "free space"), and then connect it to my PC. Same basic situation - now the disk shows as "not initialized" under XP, and I'm sure that if I initialize it, I will lose the HFS partition I just made under OSX.

I suspect that I should not be using GUIs for this?

 

[jimoblak]

I don't have an ideal answer as I tried this some time ago and gave up. But here's what I ended up doing...

Since HFS cannot be natively accessed by Windows and since OSX only reads NTFS (no write), I formatted my crossplatform drives as FAT32.

You can format the entire drive as HFS if you install MacOpener on Windows. I can't think of an app to run on Mac that will read & write NTFS.

 

[disord3r]

Well, I managed to get somewhere with it by

1) initializing the disk under xp
2) creating the two partitions (without formatting or assigning drive letters)
3) connecting the drive to the Mac
4) using newfs_hfs (HFS+) and newfs_msdos (FAT32) to create the file systems
5) connecting the drive to the PC
6) reformatting the FAT32 partition to NTFS

From there, I got no messages under either OS about not recognizing the drive or wanting initialize, but it didn't automount the HFS partition on the Mac. If I mounted it manually, it was fine. So it seemed I had accomplished what I set out to. Then, in trying to get it to automount the HFS partition, I managed to mangle everything.

So, I *did* get it to work, but I have to manually mount the HFS partition. No biggie I guess.

 

[ObviousTroll]

I went through a similar issue, and unfortunately diskutility and diskutil combine the partitioning and formatting operations in one step; I have no clue why.

 

[drlex]

disord3r
Any reason why you didn't stop at 4)?
I must have done something similar, as I have a LaCie pocket drive with FAT32 partition and HFS partition. My OS X mac is happy to read and write to either partition, yet my XP PC will only read and write to the FAT32 one.

soi la, soi carré

 

[jimoblak]

Because this is a difficult task, I fear the future when you will need to run a disk repair utility. What will happen when a Mac drive utility encounters a NTFS partition? What will happen when a Windows drive utility encounters a HFS partition? How will those drive repair utilities handle the partition table?

 

[ObviousTroll]

jimoblak,

Disk repair shouldn't cause a problem. You can repair/erase individual partitions without affecting others. You just can't, for some odd reason, do the initial format one partition at a time.