External HDD: OSX and Vista

I have an external HDD that I'd like to be able to partition in some way so that I'll be able to have a way to access files (and transfer them back and forth) between my Vista partition and my OSX (Boot Camp) and then maybe use the rest as Time Machine, if at all possible.

Is this possible? What format(s) should I use? What OS should I do it in? WD (brand of my external hdd) recommends I use Vista. What do you guys think?

 

I know this doesn't diretly answer you question, but you may be ineterested to learn about macdrive. It allows your windows partion to read and write you your mac-formated partitions.

Now to asnwer you question, formatting in FAT will allow both mac and windows to read/write.

 

Formatting to FAT will also limit a partition to 32 GB and no single file can exceed 4GB. Format the drive using HFS and then get MacDrive for Windows.

 

@Chris: FAT32 allows for large partitions, up to 2TB. Still has the 4GB file limit. See here.

You need 2 partitions: 1 for transfer, 1 for TM.

For TM, you have to use HFS+ with journaling. Not much choice there

For the transfer partition, either use Fat32 or NTFS. Mac OS X can be made to read/write NTFS using macntfs-3g. Partition the disk on the Mac, but format the NTFS volume in Windows.
If you want to use good old FAT32, use the Mac to format. Windows has some stupid limitations on what it will format as FAT, e.g. it might tell you your volume is too large when in fact it isn't. FAT32 is supported out of the box on Windows and Mac, the only problem is that it has a file size limit of 4GB.

You could also make Windows read HFS+ but I haven't had much luck with that in the past. The access software (can't remember the name, might have been MacDrive) was pretty crappy and caused compatibility issues. I ended up uninstalling it.

 

Thanks orthorim, that seemed to work!