[Liquidity X]

Well i used boot camp and NTFS everything is working great but when I boot into OS X I have a drive named untitled now, is there any way to rename this new windows drive, or should i just start over and use FAT?

[Ilgaz]

Don't use FAT. It is a disgusting piece of filesytem which MS spent billions to get rid of- still can't.

It fragments horribly, it has no journal etc.

(telling as Mac users don't know PC Filesystems much)

[Liquidity X]

so any idea on how to rename my windows drive?

[Tyler McAdams]

You can't do it when you use the boot camp partiton app? Obvioulsy you already used it, but even still I would think that if you boot in to the XP OS and rename the hard drive. I would think that OS X would then pick up the name.

[Liquidity X]

rebooting in winblows, and renaming the drive works for renaming the drive for os x. NOW a 2nd question, i know NTFS is read only to mac, but can u pull files from the windows drive and pull it to the mac and have it work ok, such a text files and images?

[Targon]

NTFS fragments just as bad if not worse mate!! in fact NTFS fragments every time u write to the disk, ALOT of fragmentation!!

[Targon]

So does your 'Macintosh HD' become the C:\ drive ??

[Ilgaz]

The "impact" of NTFS fragmentation and FAT (dos) fragmentation are very different.

Believe me, as a guy running Defrag tools even on OS X, I know it. I am kinda obsessed I must admit

[Liquidity X]

Originally Posted by Targon

So does your 'Macintosh HD' become the C drive ??

It shows up as a removable e drive, but says it needs to be formated if you try to open it.

[Tyler McAdams]

Originally Posted by Liquidity X

It shows up as a removable e drive, but says it needs to be formated if you try to open it.

There is software called MacDrive that will let you mount your OS X drive on Windows:
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/

You should be able to take files from the Windows drive no problem and use Word to open Word files... etc. (As is inside OS X)

If you need a partition that can be read and written to on both you could use a zip disk or firewire drive that is Fat32 formated and use it to "pass" files from one to the other.

[Tomchu]

Originally Posted by Liquidity X

rebooting in winblows, and renaming the drive works for renaming the drive for os x. NOW a 2nd question, i know NTFS is read only to mac, but can u pull files from the windows drive and pull it to the mac and have it work ok, such a text files and images?

Yes, if you copy the files off your NTFS drive while in OS X, you can work on them just fine as long as you use the copy on your Mac drive. You can also get something called "MacDrive" from a company named "MediaFour". Once you install that in Windows, you can have full read/write access to your Mac drive. Just beware, though ... if you ever get a viruses in Windows that scours your file systems for files to infect or damage, it will just as easily be able to damage data on your Mac drive as on your Windows drive (because you will now have write capabilities).

Originally Posted by Targon

NTFS fragments just as bad if not worse mate!! in fact NTFS fragments every time u write to the disk, ALOT of fragmentation!!

Please, get a clue.

[Targon]

Originally Posted by Tomchu

Please, get a clue.

Obvious you can't provide one.

And please, don't wave the msce certificate around.

[Tomchu]

Can you show us evidence of "in fact NTFS fragments every time u write to the disk"? I believe the onus is on you to prove your statements.

I can easily disprove your statements in a matter of minutes. I would just have to fire up this Windows rig here, run Diskeeper, write a few files, then run Diskeeper again and have it generate a set of statistics ...

[megasad]

Originally Posted by Tyler McAdams

There is software called MacDrive that will let you mount your OS X drive on Windows:
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/

I was thinking about this yesterday, and as Tomchu says, installing MacDrive in XP will mean that all your Mac stuff could potentially die.

I think the best thing to do is; XP partition in NTFS, no MacDrive in XP, the OS X partition in HFS+, and a third partition (once someone works out how to do that / Apple update Boot Camp to support it) formatted in a third, different filesystem, such as UFS. Then you can install XP and OS X on their respective partitions and use the third one as your OS X home directory (using NetInfo Manager) and within XP as well.

That's how I'll probably do it...

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by megasad

I was thinking about this yesterday, and as Tomchu says, installing MacDrive in XP will mean that all your Mac stuff could potentially die.

Couldn't a Windows virus still hose your Mac stuff if it decided to reformat all external disks instead of just deleting files? If it reformatted your Mac drive, it wouldn't matter that the drive was previously in an unreadable format...

[megasad]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Couldn't a Windows virus still hose your Mac stuff if it decided to reformat all external disks instead of just deleting files? If it reformatted your Mac drive, it wouldn't matter that the drive was previously in an unreadable format...

I don't know how Windows works when it comes to formatting drives, whether or not it can even see your HFS+ partitions as drives unless you have MacDrive installed. Should I install XP it shall purely be for games, so I'll simply disconnect from the interweb whenever I boot into Windows.

[Tyler McAdams]

Originally Posted by megasad

I was thinking about this yesterday, and as Tomchu says, installing MacDrive in XP will mean that all your Mac stuff could potentially die.

I think the best thing to do is; XP partition in NTFS, no MacDrive in XP, the OS X partition in HFS+, and a third partition (once someone works out how to do that / Apple update Boot Camp to support it) formatted in a third, different filesystem, such as UFS. Then you can install XP and OS X on their respective partitions and use the third one as your OS X home directory (using NetInfo Manager) and within XP as well.

That's how I'll probably do it...

If you're worried about viruses I would do this:

Use bootcamp to make 2 new partitions:

1 main NTFS for the OS.
1 second small fat32 dive.

Now you can easily "pass" files to each OS.

[Mithras]

Except that Boot Camp (for now) only supports 1 Mac and 1 Windows partition.

[Tomchu]

If you're running Windows as an Administrator, then a virus could potentially format your Mac partition -- but I've never heard of viruses that actually format partitions. That said, if you run as a regular user in Windows, even if you did get such a virus, it won't manage to do it due to permissions.

[Tyler McAdams]

Originally Posted by Mithras

Except that Boot Camp (for now) only supports 1 Mac and 1 Windows partition.

You could still resize the NTFS partition afterwards with Partition magic.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Tomchu

If you're running Windows as an Administrator, then a virus could potentially format your Mac partition -- but I've never heard of viruses that actually format partitions. That said, if you run as a regular user in Windows, even if you did get such a virus, it won't manage to do it due to permissions.

Yeah, this would probably solve the issue. You'd need to make sure to make yourself a non-admin account, though, as Windows XP seems to make you root by default...

[Mithras]

Sadly, pasting an icon onto the Windows drive in OS X does not allow the icon to display from the boot selection screen. So the OS X partition has my nice lovely icon, while the Windows partition is just the standard OS X hard drive image. Geez, Apple! Let's get to the important stuff already!