External Hard Drive Partitions for MAC & PC boot !

[MediaLocal.com]

I just purchased a 500GB firewire Maxtor external drive 7200rpm. I want to have two operating systems on it - XP Pro and Mac OS X, each with Pro Tools, and partitions where data can be read and written by both systems. How should I format the drive? How large of partitions? What format? Two primary partitions?

By having the operating systems on the drive, I can travel to different studios and homes with the drive and my MBox, and NOT have to worry about having protools or the right compatible version, including my plug-ins, and files - dual boot off it as an external drive. The best and ultimate set up for a large portable drive!

Fact or Myth:
Mac OS X requires to be installed within the first 8gb of the drive.
Macs cannot read drives larger than 80gb or 132gb?
Pro Tools on a Mac can NOT write to Fat32 partitions or can it?
Pro Tools doesn't like large partitions - what is large now-a-days, 100gb?

Here is the set up I think might work using Partition Magic, then a MAC for HFS+:

| 10gb primary HFS+ OS X | 10gb primary FAT32 XP | 100gb FAT32 logical | 100gb FAT32 logical
| 100gb FAT32 logical | 100gb FAT32 logical | 50gb FAT32 logical |

PLEASE _ What do you think? Will it work? the blank new drive is just sitting here awaiting..

[M.Brane]

Fact or Myth:
Mac OS X requires to be installed within the first 8gb of the drive.
Macs cannot read drives larger than 80gb or 132gb?

1: Depends on the Mac. Older Macs need X in the first 8GB if the boot volume is on the internal ATA bus.

2: Again depends on the Mac. Later revisions of the Quicksilvers can see large drives even though they're not supposed to.

Just about any PCI card will not suffer from either issue.

As for wether you can get XP, OSX, and their respective PTLE versions to coexist peacefully on the same drive, and be bootable is a tall order I think. Even if you can I don't think the performance will be anything to write home about.

[ChuckS]

I was thinking about this also, but haven't tried it yet. There are some third party products that allow Windows to read/write HFS+, but I don't know about the performance hit and check with Digi if they work. Here's some information I gathered that you can check out.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...2194&lsrc=osxh
http://answerbase.digidesign.com/detail.cfm?DID=29039
http://answerbase.digidesign.com/detail.cfm?DID=29546

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/