Can I stick four FAT32 partitions on an external drive?

I took the original 120GB (110GB actual) hard drive out of my MBP and and put it in an external USB2 case.

Can I use Vista to put four FAT32 partitions on the drive, and then effectively be able to read/write to the drive using OSX and Vista subject to the limitations of having four separate partitions?

If I plug the drive in, I'm going to see 4 new drives? lolz, so hoodie right now...

This is my ghetto solution to the NTFS thing and I have not had good luck with MacFuse.

 

If you can find a program to format it, you should be able to format the whole thing as one partition if you like.

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/ArticleID/38803/38803.html?Ad=1

I bet you could use gparted to format it. You can probably find other programs too.

 

Thanks for that, so I'm getting what I need to make a gparted LiveCD... assuming I can boot my MBP with the live CD... will it see an external USB HD?

 

Uh... I would hope so, but I don't know for sure. The LiveCD should just be a small Linux installation on CD with gparted on it... so I would expect it to be able to handle external USB drives.

 

LiveCD booted fine, but left me at a GRUB> prompt...

It's a 51MB file BTW... so, I guess I need to look up my Linux commands to see which devices it sees...

 

You can format the drive with Disk Utility. Choose MS-DOS as the Volume Format. That's FAT32.

 

AH, cool.

I tried that, but it only says FAT. If it's FAT32, that's great.

 

It is in fact FAT32. I promise!

 

+ rep

Disk Utility is the word. I did it and then checked the drive out in Windows Computer Manager, and I now have a 111GB FAT32 partition! yay!

 

Just a quick question: I have a new 500 GB external drive that I'm using for Time Machine as well as storage for my Windows partition. Right now I have it set up where I have a 200 GB HFS+ partition for TM, and the rest as NTFS for Windows. I would, though, like to have that second partition be readable by both OSes - if I made it FAT32, is there a limit to how big a single file could be in that partition scheme?

 

Yes.

Source

 

Thanks for the quick answer Xander - guess I'll stick with NTFS.

 

I use a program called MacDrive.

I have it on my 2GB usb flash drive, and I install it on any PC that I need to use my external(160GB HSF+) on. Works great.

 

$40 and only a PC side solution. Then you still have to throw money at the problem of using a Mac to write to NTFS.

FAT32 is free. As long as you don't care about the security and the file size limit, it's a good solution for my shared personal external drive. I still have Mac HFS+ and Windows NTFS external drives as well.

 

I think a lot of us are similar situation. I am going to buy an external hard-drive soon [500gb] for time machine – is there any way time machine would also backup my xp partition [FAT32] ? or do I have to find xp based solution ?