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I have a 500 GB USB External Hard Drive. I need four partitions on it, for the following purposes:

160 GB for a bootable backup of my Mac.

160 GB for a bootable backup of my Windows.

11 GB for a bootable Snow Leopard Install Disk

Rest as for file storage.

Now I need a partition table which will get recognised on both Windows and Mac, without needing extra software on Windows, which will let me keep bootable copies of both OS'es, but let me access the file storage from both OS'es.

Currently, I have a GUI Partition Table, with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Partitions for the two backups, Mac OS Extended for the Install Disk, and NTFS for the file storage. While this gets recognised perfectly on my Mac, thanks to an NTFS for Mac driver from Paragon, when connected to Windows, the drive is detected by the machine (listed in Safely Remove USB), but not recognised in Windows Explorer unless I install MacDrive, which is not feasible for me to install on public Windows Machines I might wanna access my storage area on.

Can someone recommend the best combination of formats and software/drivers to get this done seamlessly?

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Are you saying that the NTFS partition is not recognized in Windows? I think your solution looks pretty good, given that you're using the Paragon NTFS driver. How do you plan to back up Windows on a Mac OS Extended partition? – fideli Mar 12 '10 at 15:19
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AFAIK, you need multiple drives. – emgee Mar 12 '10 at 17:18
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@fideli, lol, actually, currently the windows installation I wanna backup is my Boot Camp installation, and so I thought an HFS partition would be ideal. However, from now on, I'll be backing up my Vista PC, so I'm gonna have to change that to NTFS or FAT32. and @emgee, how does BootCamp work? I understand its some special partition table that integrates both GPT and MBR. Checking wiki.onmac.net/index.php/… out right now... – Neil Mar 12 '10 at 17:47
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2 Answers

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The best tool out there for partitioning is GParted. You'd have to run it from a CD.

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Your scheme sounds fine, if that's what you need.

For file storage on both OS's you'll be best suited with NTFS or FAT. While windows does have some tools to access mac's HFS I don't think it's all that reliable even if it's not journaled. Get NTFS if you want permissions, FAT if you want to keep it simple.

For the bootable partitions, I honestly never did it on a USB disk so I'm not sure how to do it (yet). It's not the same thing as setting a multi boot on the internal hard disk at all, and I'm not sure if it's possible to do it on the USB. It doesn't evolve MBR or GUID. I'll edit this if I find something.

Lastly, doing partitions is never a "seamlessly" thing. All that is a lot of work, always. The Ubuntu installation, for instance, have 7 simple steps to install the whole Operating System. The only complicated one is the partitioning. The same goes for Windows and Mac, but they both have more steps.

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up vote 1 down vote

I will be surprised if this is possible. For a drive to be bootable on MacOS, it needs to have a GUID partition table. But for it to be bootable/readable on Windows, it needs an MBR partition table...

As far as I am aware the two are mutually exclusive.

If I'm wrong, someone please correct me -- I'd love to know how this can be done! (And I'm sure Neil would, too!)

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Windows Vista and 7 should be able to read a GPT drive but will not be able to boot from it. – emgee Mar 12 '10 at 17:14
@emgee: Thanks. I have changed my answer to "bootable/readable" – Josh Mar 12 '10 at 17:31
Ya somehow the drive is accessible from my Vista PC, although it is rather prone to errors and crashes :S But on my school PCs, which still live in the previous decade, the disc isn't recognized at all. What I wanna know is, if a software like MacDrive can achieve this task, isn't there any way that driver or whatever can be integrated directly into my hard drive? – Neil Mar 12 '10 at 17:44
@Josh you're partially wrong. Simply put: bootcamp. You actually can have both boots in the same hard disk working to boot in either one partition. But you're right the two partition schemes are exclusive, tho just in the MBR. – Cawas Mar 15 '10 at 21:41
@Cawas: Ah ha. You may be right. bootcamp uses a hybrid GUID/MBR scheme. Are there any 3rd party tools which can create such a scheme? – Josh Mar 15 '10 at 22:41
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