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    External USB Hard Drive...two partitions...NTFS and HFS?

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by kentl901, Apr 15, 2010.

  1. kentl901

    kentl901 Notebook Consultant

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    Hey all,

    Is it possible to split my external hard disk into two partition? The drive is originally NTFS.. but I'm looking to split it so that the second partition is Mac OS compatible.

    My plan is to use Partition Manager in Windows so that I can split the drive without having to lose data. Then plug it back into Mac OSX so that I can format the new partition to a Mac compatible format.

    Is this idea feasible?

    Thanks!
     
    kentl901, Apr 15, 2010
    #1
  2. SP Forsythe

    SP Forsythe Notebook Evangelist

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    Absolutely,

    I have a few drives partitioned with multiple file systems. The way you outline should work fine.

    Another possibility is formatting the second partition (the non NTFS one) with FAT32, so that the entire drive can be natively read/written by the Windows machine (good if you need to transfer files back and forth), and still be usable for the Mac files. If you don't care, then what you suggested will be better as HFS+ is superior to FAT32 in other ways.
     
    SP Forsythe, Apr 15, 2010
    #2
  3. jackluo923

    jackluo923 Notebook Virtuoso

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    Or you can install a plugin on your mac to read/write on ntsf file system.
     
    jackluo923, Apr 15, 2010
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  4. weinter

    weinter /dev/null

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    Install ntfs-3g to solve the issue of read/write to Windows.
     
    weinter, Apr 15, 2010
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