Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

mfbernstein · Jan 5, 2008, 09:32 PM

Running Leopard and XP Pro here, side by side. Need each (and no, Parallels/VMWare is not an acceptable solution). Have a 3rd 'data' partition for music/photos/whatnot.

What I'd like to do is just use the 3rd partition as my user (home) directory - symlink to it or something. However, the partition is fat32, which means all sorts of funky limitations. Anybody tried this combo? Thanks.

(Unfortunately fat32 is the only reliable format writable by both Windows and OS X. OS X built-in NTFS support is read-only. ntfs-3g is not only slow, but useless since it pretends to be a networked drive, breaking key apps like Lightroom. MacDrive for XP would in theory do the trick, but in practice has been slow and unreliable).

mduell · Jan 5, 2008, 10:56 PM

wrong thread

ghporter · Jan 5, 2008, 11:09 PM

Boot Camp will ONLY work with a single-volume startup disk, and will ONLY produce two partitions-one for OS X and the other for whatever Windows you put on it. So to start off, you're going to have problems with having that third partition. Have you tried using MacFuse instead of NTFS-3G? I've heard very good things about it.

mfbernstein · Jan 5, 2008, 11:50 PM

First, why has this thread been moved? It's a MacOS X question, not an Alt OS question. I know how XP works with Fat32 (quite well, obviously), it's OS X I'm wondering about.

Second, Boot Camp will let you have as many partitions as you want. Boot Camp is just firmware/drivers. OS X's Disk Utility can be a bit unhelpeful, but even then, I had 4 partitions for a while (MacOS X, Windows, Linux, Linux swap), so I don't see how this is an issue.

Third, MacFUSE is the umbrella infrastructure for ntfs-3g (so they're the same thing). It's useless to me for the reasons I listed above - it behaves like a networked drive for OS X, and so breaks Lightroom, which is an app I happen to need.

silver · Jan 6, 2008, 01:24 AM

Don't use ntfs-3g it's slow. If you want Full read/write speeds then use NTFSforMacOSX from Paragon. I've been using it for a while now and it hands down blows ntfs-3g.

Yep, that's exactly what Boot Camp is firmware/drivers- I can make 3 or more partitions easily no problems. I just make all my partitions in disc utility not the Boot Camp app, boot from XP disc then allow XP to format the newly made partition to NTFS. That way I have OS X, XP Pro, Ubuntu.

Not to sure about moving a user directory to a FAT32 partition, never had to do it.

Cheers

Sven G · 04:48 AM

The latest NTFS-3G DMG package now automounts NTFS volumes as local drives (at least they look so in the Finder): a fairly recent change, I think...

ghporter · Jan 6, 2008, 10:45 AM

Originally Posted by mfbernstein

First, why has this thread been moved? It's a MacOS X question, not an Alt OS question. I know how XP works with Fat32 (quite well, obviously), it's OS X I'm wondering about.

Second, Boot Camp will let you have as many partitions as you want. Boot Camp is just firmware/drivers. OS X's Disk Utility can be a bit unhelpeful, but even then, I had 4 partitions for a while (MacOS X, Windows, Linux, Linux swap), so I don't see how this is an issue.

Third, MacFUSE is the umbrella infrastructure for ntfs-3g (so they're the same thing). It's useless to me for the reasons I listed above - it behaves like a networked drive for OS X, and so breaks Lightroom, which is an app I happen to need.

Firstly, I moved this thread because it IS about alternate OSs-and how OS X interacts with them. If you weren't interested in an alternate OS, you wouldn't worry about Boot Camp at all.

Second, Boot Camp is TWO separate things. It is FIRST a partitioning utility (maybe a front end on kernel code, but a utility none the less), that will ONLY work with the startup disc beginning as a single volume, and will ONLY produce a second partition. SECOND, it is a set of Windows drivers for the Mac hardware. In order to get to the point of using the drivers, one must partition the disk, and the vast majority of users do this with Boot Camp (which is free) rather than some third-party app (that is not free). So when one says "I'm planning to use Boot Camp to install Windows," one almost always means "I'm going to partition my disk using Boot Camp, and then use the Boot Camp drivers to make Windows run on my hardware.

If you have gone to the trouble of using a third party app to partition your disk into a zillion pieces, the Boot Camp-supplied drivers will not care in the least. But that's a separate issue from "using Boot Camp," at least to me and a lot of other users.

Third, as for MacFuse being a shell for ntfs-3g, I was not aware of that. Nor was I aware of the fact that it doesn't mount an NTFS drive the way it would any other drive-I haven't actually taken the plunge yet. I had sort of planned to go there after I install Vista some time later this month. You'll note that I did not personally endorse MacFuse, but rather pointed out that I'd seen positive reports about it. Thank you for your more experienced viewpoint.

silver · 12:47 PM

@ghporter you DONT need Boot Camp to partition a drive to be used as a XP/Vista partition. You CAN use Disk Utility which is FREE and comes with the OS X. Just wondering what app are you talking about when you wrote this:

In order to get to the point of using the drivers, one must partition the disk, and the vast majority of users do this with Boot Camp (which is free) rather than some third-party app (that is not free).

Alternative FREE SETUP:

1. Open disk utlity.
2. Set up partitions.
3. Reboot with XP/Vista disc.
4. If you want NTFS then let XP/Vista format that partition.
5. If you want FAT32 which is what Boot Camp and Disk Utility create then just install XP/Vista without reformat.
6. Install XP/Vista
Reboot all is well.

As you can see I don't use the Boot Camp app. for partitioning at all. Only use the drivers on my Leopard Disc minus the ATI drivers, I get them from Omega much much more faster and stable.

Cheers

mfbernstein · Jan 7, 2008, 01:17 AM

Originally Posted by Sven G

The latest NTFS-3G DMG package now automounts NTFS volumes as local drives (at least they look so in the Finder): a fairly recent change, I think...

Goodness, you're right! Looks like NTFS-3G is picking up steam. Guess I'll give it another chance. Thanks!

mfbernstein · Jan 7, 2008, 01:27 AM

Originally Posted by ghporter

Firstly, I moved this thread because it IS about alternate OSs-and how OS X interacts with them. If you weren't interested in an alternate OS, you wouldn't worry about Boot Camp at all.

<shrug>

It's your forum, so if it makes you happy... Just seems odd to me given that using Windows-formatted disks from within MacOS X (for various reasons) predates Boot Camp et al. by a number of years.

Regarding the original question, it looks like I prematurely dismissed NTFS-3G, so I'll give it another go.

Finally, I'll say that while in my specific case, VMWare isn't an option (several pieces of hardware I use aren't fully supported by OS X), for most things, I'd recommend it over Boot Camp. Real Windows is a real pain...

ghporter · Jan 7, 2008, 09:59 AM

Originally Posted by silver

@ghporter you DONT need Boot Camp to partition a drive to be used as a XP/Vista partition. You CAN use Disk Utility which is FREE and comes with the OS X. Just wondering what app are you talking about when you wrote this:

Any number of third party apps that dynamically (and non-destructively) repartiton a drive with HFS partitions, like iPartition, Drive Genius, etc. Destructive partitioning is not terribly helpful, especially when you're dealing with a less-than-technical user. Sure, you can do a full backup, do the destructive partitioning, and then restore your backup, but that's a royal pain, right?

Of course if you have a way to use DU that is NOT destructive, please post it-I have never seen any way to change partitions with it that does not generate empty partitions.

ghporter · Jan 7, 2008, 10:01 AM

Originally Posted by mfbernstein

<shrug>

It's your forum, so if it makes you happy...

If this had nothing to do with using some OS other than OS X, I'd have left it. But the point was to have multiple OSs have access to a separate partition, right? If so, the thread belongs here.

Originally Posted by mfbernstein

Regarding the original question, it looks like I prematurely dismissed NTFS-3G, so I'll give it another go.

Good luck with it. If I manage to get the time to play with it, I hope to have good results myself.

Originally Posted by mfbernstein

Real Windows is a real pain...

I couldn't agree more!

mfbernstein · Jan 7, 2008, 11:42 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

Any number of third party apps that dynamically (and non-destructively) repartiton a drive with HFS partitions, like iPartition, Drive Genius, etc. Destructive partitioning is not terribly helpful, especially when you're dealing with a less-than-technical user. Sure, you can do a full backup, do the destructive partitioning, and then restore your backup, but that's a royal pain, right?

Of course if you have a way to use DU that is NOT destructive, please post it-I have never seen any way to change partitions with it that does not generate empty partitions.

You have to use the command line version, because Apple's front-end doesn't provide access to the feature (indeed, this is what the Boot Camp assistant uses). It's possible that some 3rd party does have a front-end, but I'm not aware of it.

If you're interested, there are some good examples at OnMac. Note that if your disk is too full, or too fragmented, the process may not succeed - although there's no data loss either way.

ghporter · Jan 8, 2008, 11:53 AM

mfbernstein, I'll have to look at DU's command line now. Thanks for the tip. It's not something that is very obvious, (and rightly so), but I had yet to even see anyone mention that Disk Utility could resize or create partitions without destroying existing ones. Thanks again.

Sven G · Jan 8, 2008, 02:09 PM

Disk Utility in Leopard 10.5.x can resize HFS+ partitions nondestructively: a very good thing, finally!

ghporter · Jan 8, 2008, 07:35 PM

Originally Posted by Sven G

Disk Utility in Leopard 10.5.x can resize HFS+ partitions nondestructively: a very good thing, finally!

I haven't played with it, but the help says you can "enlarge a volume". It says specifically that this destroys that volume that comes after the one you're enlarging, and it doesn't say anything about shrinking a volume. I had hoped that something more capable would have been part of Leopard, but this is a start.