Searcher7 wrote:


Thanks.

I copied that long post of yours for future reference, because I plan
to get a couple more external drives.(They are usually used and gotten
via Craigslist or eBay). :-)

I all honesty, I'm amazed that these things can be so complicated.
That said, I did what Philo said and deleted the partition in "Disk
Management". It was that easy. Apparently, the first time around I
didn't get all the options for partition size.

It took three hours to format and now I have 465.76GB NTFS to work
with.

Thanks again.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.

Well, what threw me off, was your claim that you could only make the
partition 17.76GB on the first attempt.

What may have happened, is the Mac disk was GPT, and the MBR value
was intended to be "protective". And somehow, the "Protective" value
left room for a 17.76GB partition. It wasn't supposed to leave room
for anything.

Then, after creating that partition, WinXP no longer recognized the fact
it was a GPT disk (MBR lost the 0xEE partition type value, something
you could have seen with PTEDIT32). And maybe then, having overwritten
the MBR with something "WinXP friendly", Philo's idea of just deleting it
and making it again, worked.

If you prepare a disk on the Mac again some time, have a look with PTEDIT32
to satisfy your curiosity, in terms of whether the MBR had a 0xEE partition
type, and whether it leaves room to sneak in a small partition. The
Wikipedia article claims the protection partition declaration is
supposed to cover the entire disk. (I.e. The MBR declaration is a
"fake", intended to scare off GPT-unfriendly OSes.) The fact that you
could make a change to it in WinXP, suggests whatever was written in the
MBR, just wasn't good enough.

This stuff isn't that complicated. Usually, all it takes is some tools
to allow viewing the disk contents, and some good web articles.

The easiest way to pass a disk between WinXP and OSX, is probably to
prep the disk on WinXP and use a regular MBR setup. As far as I know,
OSX can mount FAT32 and NTFS, just like a Linux can, and will play nicely
if you move the WinXP prepared disk back and forth. It would appear
moving the Mac prepared disk, over to WinXP, didn't work out quite as
well. Since I stopped buying new versions of the OS for my old
Mac, there hasn't been much need to follow the file system developments.
In the past, I've just used FAT32 for this (moving files Mac -- PC).

Paul