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Create HFS+ and FAT32 partitions on one external drive.
Authored by: tikimojo on May 11, '08 12:53:15AM
I found an easier way to do this. OSX 10.4 and Windows XP.
  1. Start Disk Utility (the GUI program, not the command-line version) on your mac.
  2. Select your external drive, using the partition GUI setup two FAT32 (aka MS-DOS) partitions on your drive.
  3. Connect your external drive to your XP pc. The partitions should appear.
  4. Start Windows Explorer, highlight one of those partitions
  5. go under the "file" menu, select "format"
  6. now you can format that partition as NTFS
  7. once it's done with that, disconnect the external drive from your PC and connect it to your mac
  8. now in Disk Utility you'll see your two partitions. Select the remaining FAT32 (MS-DOS) partition and reformat that partition as Mac OS extended (aka HFS+)
Now you've got a working NTFS (what windows likes) partition and a working HFS+ partition (what mac likes) on the same hard drive, and without any additional software or using the command line tools.

Keep in mind that without additional software the PC won't read the mac partition, and the mac won't read the NTFS partition. You can leave the partitions as FAT32 which both will read, but there are limitations to that which you can read about elsewhere.

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