Creating Mac-ready partition on XP drive

[YmkFX]

I have an external hard drive for personal use that I need for a class. The class only uses Macs however, and programs that apparently "do not like PC hard drives." I was wondering how I could take the existing free gigabytes on my PC external drive and partition them for use on a Mac. My primary concern here is with not losing my PC data, and effectively making my single drive turn into two, a Mac drive and a PC drive, through the use of partitioning and formatting.

Any ideas? Is this even possible?

 

[jonathonball]

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=59758

http://forums.osxfaq.com/viewtopic.php?t=4893&sid=80ce85134c4983bc17366b91b5e01e37

Seems to me that you can use Partition magic to make the partitions on the PC. Which ever partition the mac will be reading from needs to be FAT32 (From what I can tell OSX can read NTFS but not write to it, but i know nothing about Mac so that's a guess based on what I've read)

Alternatively you could format the drive on your Mac as single HSF+ partition and then use a program like MacDrive to read the files from your PC.

Those are just ideas, I'm sure someone else knows more.

 

[Farva]

it may understand FAT32. not sure though.

 

[utekineir]

i use an external 320 gig drive formatted for fat32 with no problems between my mac and pc.

When it was formatted with nfts i could read the data on the mac , but not write anything.