Format for external HD for MBP ?

Hi,

I just bought a 15" MBP. I'm looking for a firewire 800 external hard drive to use it with Time Machine. Difficult to find but I'm sure I'll succeed !

This being said, I have a question : I have this MBP and a PC desktop (which also has a firewire port). If I find a, say, 2 To hard drive, could I create 2 partitions : one under the Mac format HFS+ for Time Machine and one under a PC format (FAT32 for instance) ? Or is the decision about the format applicable to the entire drive, irrespective of the partitions ?

Thanks for your help !

 

G-Drive mini

Firewire 800
7200 RPM
Available in Apple store


I use one, and I love it.

 

if i understood ur question right , Yes you can format ur external hard disk to 2 partitions , whith whatever format u like , just remember that maximum file size on fat 32 is 4gb , while it's alot larger in NTFS and HFS , so consider formatting the windows partition to ntfs and buy paragon ntfs so u can write on that drive from the mac, or leave the drive as one NTFS partition and install paragon ntfs on mac and u ll be able to use timemachine and every thing on the drive , cheers

 

You indeed got my point, beige.

The 4gb limit is not an issue for me at this stage so will probably stick with fat32 for now. I could always switch to NTFS (of course through a complete reformatting of the hard drive) later, if required.

Thanks a lot.

 

side note: if you want to convert te drive later on you can actually have XP/Vista/seven convert FAT/FAT32 disks to NTFS using the convert.exe command

but before you do a convert it does not hurt to back up any very important data on the drive to a folder on your computer. I have done a few hundred converts with only one issue ( a failing HDD with bad sectors did not work ) but better to be safe then sorry.