How to divide LaCie external disk to three parts?

[artov]

I bought LaCie BigDisk (600GB, so it is as name says). It came formatted as
one HFS+ partition, but I like to use it as a backup disk for both my Powerbook
and PC which has Linux and Windows. So I tought to use Disk Utilitity to partition
it into three different partitions. One would contain HFS+ for Mac, second
NTFS for Windows and the third would be XFS for Linux.

I used the partition command and divided the disk to three parts, made the first
as HFS+ partition. The rest I left as free. Then I mount the disk onto Linux, but
its fdisk did not understand the partition schema. Then I partitioned the disk using
fdisk (Linux) and marked the Windows and Mac partition as NTFS. Windows could
format its partition, but as I guessed, on Mac Disk Utitlity could not change the
filesystem to HFS. I tried the newfs_hfs command. It claimed that it made the
filesystem, but mount could not mount it.

So, is there any way to put the three filesystems onto the disk so that
both OS/X, Linux and Windows/XP could find its own filesystem (there is no
need to access the filesystems across OSs), either using PC type or Apple
type partition?

If not, what is suitable backup program for OS/X that can backup the HFS+
to FAT32? I'd prefer some that could make incremental backups (I tought
on using rdiff_backup both on OS/X and Linux)?

--
Arto Viitanen

[artov]

After reading macosxhints and macosx, it turn out that I was almost there.
I had the disk partitioned using Disk Utility to three PC partitiones, made
a partition as a HFS+ filesystem using newfs_hfs and another a XFS
Linux filesystem at Linux. Then I had to mark the HFS+ partition as a Mac
partition using Linux fdisk. The partition type is "af". That is all there is
needed (Mac wise, for Windows I marked the NTFS as NTFS partition and
am just formatting it as a NTFS "disk").