Mac pro 2nd drive which can be read/write to in first drives os x/vista partitions

[98707]

I just bought a western digital caviar drive from newegg to use as a 2nd hard disk to hold just my music so when I'm on vista I can play games and listen to my music and while im working in OS X I can also playback the audio.

Here is the dilemma.. I know there is software that I can install in os x to make ntfs drives read/write in os x.. but I dont want my vista partion to be that way.. JUST my music hard disk.

Could anyone tell me how I can format this disk so that it will be read/write in both OS's? I read that fat32 is so basic any os can read it.. but it can only be formatted in partitions up to 32 gigs so that is no good since ive got around 50 gigabytes of music.



How can I do this? What are my options here?

 

[Fleetwood Mac]

There are programs that make this possible. MacFuse makes NTFS volumes writable to Mac OS X, and MacDrive allows Windows to write to HFS formatted drives.

To my knowledge, neither program gives you the ability to explicitly disallow the OS the write to a given partition.

 

[98707]

There are programs that make this possible. MacFuse makes NTFS volumes writable to Mac OS X, and MacDrive allows Windows to write to HFS formatted drives.

To my knowledge, neither program gives you the ability to explicitly disallow the OS the write to a given partition.

I have heard of MacFuse. Have you ever tried it. I read in another forum however that use of MacFuse is not recommended because there have been a significant number of occurences where trying to use it to write to the ntfs volume ended up in data loss/corruption. Have you ever heard of that or know if its mostly ********.

 

[ewinemiller]

Having used MacDrive I can tell it is also not a good solution. It tends to lock up and corrupt the HFS drive. I was using it to access source code on the OSX partition, but it pretty much guaranteed at least one hard lock up and a handful of corrupted files every 4 hour session of coding.

There are ways to format the drive for more than 32gig for fat32, just google it. The limit is put in XP to push NTFS, not because of an inherent limit of fat32.

Another option is if you can use the drive in another machine and just share it as a network drive or hook up some sort of NAS device. They are dropping in price and you can get them for not much more than a USB drive these days.

good luck.