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Make a mac bootable dual-partitioned HFS+/FAT32 drive play nice with Windows
Authored by: smed on Apr 29, '11 08:54:35AM

I wanted the multi-tool of USB drives. Two partitions; one bootable mac partition and one that can be read and written by both macs and windows machines. I finally got it done and I don't know why it works, but it does. Here's the deal.

Equipment: a USB drive of 16 GB larger (try to find one that is fast too), a drive or partition with a minimal OSX build or your liking (10.6.7 for me was 7.2 GB), a running mac, a windows (virtual) machine (I used parallels 5 with Windows 7)

The procedure:
1. Partition the USB drive with GUID partition table; first partition Fat32 (or exFat) and the second HFS+ (8GB minimum to fit OSX)
2. Plug the drive into the windows machine and agree to it formatting the drive (200 MB only for some reason) and label it something odd (I use xxx)
3. Plug the drive into a Mac, fire up Disk Utility, click on the USB drive, select partition tab, select the xxx partition and press the "delete" key. You are now back to having two partitions.
4. Restore (using Disk Utility) your prebuilt minimal OSX to the HFS+ partition.
5. I like to do a Disk Utility repair on the HFS+ partition following the restore.

You now have a mac bootable USB drive that has a windows partition that is readable and writable by both macs and windows.




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