Formatting and partitioning a Mac HDD

Douggie · Post by **Douggie** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 5:01 pm

So I just got a MacBook for about a month and installed both Mac OS X and Windows XP. The problem is that I don't understand anything from the partitioning, because it annoys me that you can't leave a space unpartitioned or just remove a partition. At first I thought "free space" was leaving a part partitioned, but eventually it seemed that you cannot do anything at all with "free space" - not even format into something else (correct me if I'm wrong) unless you delete all the partitions (which made me reinstall Mac OS and Windows XP after I made two seperate partitions with one as "free space" for WinXP).

Okay enough irritation, my question is: how can you leave something unpartitioned (like you can delete partitions in fdisk and have a part unpartitioned) in Mac OS? The problem lies with the Mac OS partition, which is GPT protected, that means you can't do anything with it in Windows (I have an extern HDD which was the previous HDD of my MacBook that I now have replaced with a bigger one), so I have to format it into FAT32, which is the only one that Windows XP recognizes and then format into NTFS in Windows XP. That's not a big problem, but for some reason Mac OS leaves a GPT protected partition of 200MB that I cannot delete. 200MB isn't much, but I know for sure that I'll need it when the time comes and this problem just bugs me..

So any Mac experts here to help me? Thanks!

Shazzy · Post by **Shazzy** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 3:16 pm

A partition is just a way of splitting your hard drive into chunks. "Free space" is any space you don't put files on.

If you want one hard drive for your Mac system, one for your Windows system, and the rest for your files, make 3 partitions.

Shazzy · Post by **Shazzy** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 3:16 pm

And there will always be some space (200 MB sounds right) that you can't use. Your computer needs it for directory information.