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NTFS?
Authored by: Ruahrc on Jan 03, '06 11:59:25PM

I too wanted NTFS and HFS+ on my external HD. Here's my situation:

I have a 200GB external HD that I wanted to use to back up both my laptop (Powerbook) and desktop (Windows XP PC). The PC is formatted NTFS, the laptop is HFS+, and I had 20GB spare (200GB - 120GB PC - 60GB laptop = 20GB spare) on the external that I wanted to partition as FAT32 for common access.

I followed the instructions above (tiger, 10.4.3) and it all worked fine. Then I mounted the drive in Windows and reformatted my 120GB partition into NTFS. As you said I can no longer see the NTFS volume from OS X (or at least it doesn't automount) nor do I see the HFS+ volume in Windows. For me though this was no issue. Since the NTFS and HFS+ volumes are for backup only, I only need access to the appropriate volume on the appropriate platform, which happens. The FAT32 volume shows up on both platforms. This way, in fact, is even a little cleaner since connecting the drive to either computer will now only automount the appropriate 2 volumes! Maybe this wasn't working for you though since you needed to access your NTFS volume on OS X (but read-only? OS X cannot natively write to NTFS volumes)

Should I be wary of any other effects I may have incurred by switching from FAT32 to NTFS in Windows? I'm worried about bootability. My current external hard disk is (was) USB, but since I learned here that OS X needs Firewire to boot from, I have since returned my HD and will get a firewire one instead. If I follow these same procedures AND reformat the big FAT32 into NTFS in windows, will I have trouble making a bootable HFS+ clone of my current PB disk?

Thanks for the tip- this one was great! Now I need to go back and better understand the logic behind it all hehe...



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