I have a pc from which I took out the HD which is now my Imac external HD. I've decided to use the pc and don't want to buy another HD. What sort of partiioning do i need to do on the HD to share it ?
I presently have 2 partitions created with my Mac but when I hook the pc to it, Win XP only seems to see one big disk. What's the answer?
Hi Jim,
Just to get a couple of assumptions out of the way, I assume you have no data on this external drive yet, or if you do, you don't mind erasing it? And also I assume you know that only one computer, PC or Mac, can be connected to the external drive at a time?
OK, with those out of the way, there are a couple of possible sources of problems here with formatting and partitioning a drive from a Mac for use by a PC:
1) Can the PC read the partition table created on your external drive by your Mac?
2) Can the PC read the Mac's native formatting (e.g. HFS+, ...) of each partition?
The answer to (2) is 'no', or at least not without 3rd-party software on your PC. You could try ensuring that the first partition is formatted in a PC format like FAT32 or NTFS by your Mac's /applications/utilities/Disk Utility.app. But if your PC stills sees your mac-partitioned drive as one single disk, it's likely that the answer to (1) is also 'no'.
If you determine by the above experimenting that your PC cannot read the hard-drive's partition table, as created by your Mac, then you can try the reverse: format and partition the drive on your PC (using Partition Magic or equivalent). Macs can only read NTFS-formatted partitions, but they can read-and-write FAT32 partitions.
So you'd likely end up with an NTFS-formatted partition for the PC side of things, and a max 32GB FAT32-formatted partition for the Mac side of things. Not knowing the size of your external drive, or what sort of things you want to store on the Mac side of things, I can't comment on the suitability of a 32GB* FAT32 partition for your Mac. I'd assume performance would be less on the Mac side of things, and I might not be comfortable with the Mac writing things to a FAT32-formatted partition if that were my only copy of these files.
best of luck,
...b
*If i'm interpreting this Microsoft Knowledge base article Q314463 correctly, Windows can't normally format as FAT32 any partition larger than 32GB:
Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q314463&
The FAT32 disk size limit is actually 2 terabytes. The limitation Ben quotes above is *only* during the system installation process where you are trying to have the system installer format the drive.
But I would be inclined to format the drive under Windoze (FAT32) and then use it on both.