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uruiamme · Jul 7, 2007, 08:59 PM

I ran out of room on my MacBook Pro's hard drive. I used the "max" 32GB FAT partiton for my Windows XP install C: drive. Now, I would like to add a D: drive so that I can store more files on the D: drive.

Has anyone done this? I need someone experienced, not an educated guesser.

Maybe next time I will try to hack a way to get me a larger FAT32 disk for the laptop. I would prefer not to have to re-install Windows XP when just adding a D: drive would be sufficient. (There are ways to format a larger disk as FAT32 for Windows, but not normally during setup. If I had thought of this problem in January I would have done that.)

By the way, FAT32 is awful. Although I need Mac and Windows file read and write capability to the drive, I sure wish this didn't require the clunky FAT32. Every time something goes wrong, the drive has to be checked.

Mithras · Jul 7, 2007, 09:27 PM

Buy MacDrive for the PC. Or use MacFUSE for the Mac. Or both.

ghporter · Jul 7, 2007, 09:45 PM

Or get an external drive and partition it. Goofing around with partitioning on a mixed drive is difficult as it is. Since Windows can't even SEE the HFS+ partition your OS X is on, and OS X can't mess with an existing NTFS partition, playing with your FAT32 partition sounds like walking a tightrope without a net.

uruiamme · 01:44 AM

Yeah, I've got an external drive. But I really wanted to be able to install applications on the D: drive, and unfortunately, this might be ugly if the external drive is not attached and whoops I need to run the program. And since I'm talking about a large app like CS3 that I will use a lot, the extra space will be nice to have on the 160 GB internal drive. (I could squeeze it into the 32GB partition, but just barely.)

I will check into MacDrive. Of course, some of that stuff seems silly, when if I could coax the Boot Camp/ OS X into partitioning drive letters at will, it would be great. But I noticed right off the bat that BootCamp does not (for example) support a triple boot Vista, XP, Mac. Meaning that its partitioning options are somewhat limited to the basic Win/Mac ideal.

On my desktop, I use rEFIt. But on the desktop, I have three separate physical Western Digital hard drives, two of which are for Windows, one is Mac. Partitioning works fine like that.

ghporter · Jul 8, 2007, 12:21 PM

If you try to run a Windows app from an external drive that's not currently attached, you'll get an error message. That's all-no explosions, car crashes or sirens, just an error message. That's why it's such a great way to go-you forget to connect and you get a reminder.

And of course you can partition external drives, or with a Mac Pro separate internal drives, to your heart's content. It's just that boot drive with the funky "mixed marriage" of HFS+ and NTFS or FAT32 that's the problem.

phoenix78 · Jul 9, 2007, 10:48 PM

I only gave 20 Gb to m XP partition and ran out of space from application installations, ie: games

It is possible to simply leave the applications installed and drag the space consuming application folder to an external HD and then delete it from your C: drive. That will create space for other installs. If you need that program again you can just drag and drop it back to where it was originally installed. This worked for me.

Of course you will want to have the applications you use frequently installed.

Otherwise, make a back up of your windows data and make sure you have the cds for your applications handy and just restore your mac via bootcamp, ie: deletes your windows partition as if you never installed windows. This will allow you to restart the bootcamp process all over again and this time set a partition size that will better reflect your usage of windows.

rob.

uruiamme · Jul 14, 2007, 04:43 AM

MacDrive is smart. Got it for $45 shipped. It works very well so far. I will try to install software to it and see how it comes out. Adding a 120 GB is pretty easy like that.

Kadarin · Jul 18, 2007, 05:07 AM

I have Parallels 3.0, current version, and I have a running VM with XP as the host OS (this is also the same XP install as I have for Boot Camp). XP is sitting on a 32GB partition that is formatted as NTFS.

In performing a quick test, I am able to create a text file in OSX and save it directly to the XP partition, and the file is able to be read by a word processing application in XP.