External Hard Drive

[Fahrvergnugen]

I have searched through many threads and can not seem to find anyone with the same problem that I am having. I have an external USB 2.0 hard drive (250GB) that I am trying to use with my Mac AND PC. I do not necessarily want to be able to share files between platforms, but I do want to have the ability to store files and use it as a back up device for both platforms. What I would like to do is have 2 partions; 1 OS X, and 1 NTFS.

My approach initially was to create 1 partition using Windows XP. I then plugged the external drive into my Mac and started Disk Utility. Disk Utility just hung and never did recognize the drive. So I deleted the partition (using Windows) and started with a completely blank unpartitioned drive. Plugged the drive to the Mac, restarted and used Disk Utility to try and create two partions. Under the "Volume Scheme" I selected 2 partitions. The second partion I just selected "empty space" for the format, and the first partition I selected "Mac OS X Extended (journaled)", named the partition and selected the "partition" button. The drive had some activity and then Disk Utility just hung again???

So after my first approach as described above I tried many more times with the same result. Disk Utility even hangs if I try just a single partition?? I am pretty new and naive when it comes to Macs and I am doing my best to try and get through this, but why is this so difficult? If I could just get one single partition that the Mac would recognize I would feel like I have made some progress. I have read many posts that mention the use of FAT32 so that you can read/write on both platforms, but that is not necessarily my intention. I just want external storage for both platforms on a single, large drive. Am I living in a fantasy land? Seems like it isn't an unreasonable request??

Any advice / guidance / help is very much appreciated.
__________________
iMac 17", 1.25GHz G4, 768MB RAM, OS X 10.3.9

[Satcomer]

Your best bet would be to plug it into the Mac. Then format it with two partitions, one for the OS X extended and the other FAT32. Then plug the drive into your PC and reformat the FAT32 partition and change it to NTFS.

To fix your Disk Utility hang problem just go to ~/Library/Preferences/ and delete the file com.apple.DiskUtility.plist. Then try the format. I hope this helps.

[lemontwyst]

Originally Posted by Satcomer

~/Library/Preferences/ and delete the file com.apple.DiskUtility.plist.

is it okay to delete this file.... pardon the ignorance...

[Satcomer]

Yep. It just contains your personal preferences (window size and such). Believe it or not that sometimes throw out these preference files actually helps sometimes.