[rerks]

hi

first off a bit of info. i use a MacBook Pro as my main computer now but when i had a windows laptop i had my games installed on a Firewire/USB external hard drive to save space. when i got my Mac i made an HFS+ (native for Mac OS X) partition and kept the NTFS partition. i then installed windows on the Mac purely for playing games on the external hard drive.

first off i installed Vista and the NTFS disk showed up fine but Vista seemed to crash my games even though i had nothing else installed and the internet was not connected. i tried using a friends PC which had XP installed and the games played fine.

so i decided to install XP on my boot camp partition. now my NTFS disk does not show up in My Computer. ive tried using Firewire and USB but no luck. however in disk management the NTFS partition shows up and so does the HFS+ partition (labelled as unknown) but the NTFS partition is labelled as "Unallocated".

how do i make the NTFS disk show up? i dont want to format the whole external drive as i have some very important files on the HFS+ side.

thanks for reading and i look forward to your replies.

Edited by rerks, 28 February 2008 - 10:26 PM.

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Allow me to recap to make sure I got this correct:

You're running a MacBook Pro with a boot camp install of WinXp.
You have an external drive with an HFS+ partition and an NTFS partition.
XP will see both partitions on the external device in Disk Manager, but you have no drive letter assigned to the NTFS partition.
Also, the NTFS partition is showing up as "unallocated" in Disk Manager.

Sounds like the your NTFS partition is either corrupted or was done incrorectly and will most likely need to be redone from within XP. You should be able to just redo the NTFS partition in disk manager without touching the HFS partition. What OS did you use to create the NTFS partition initially? OS X doesn't always do the greatest job with NTFS partitions.

In any case, depending on the games you're playing, running them form an external device is not ideal. Unless you're running an eSATA interface, the external drive will be quite a bit slower than an internal drive. Just a tip.

[jeffk813]

Allow me to recap to make sure I got this correct:

You're running a MacBook Pro with a boot camp install of WinXp.
You have an external drive with an HFS+ partition and an NTFS partition.
XP will see both partitions on the external device in Disk Manager, but you have no drive letter assigned to the NTFS partition.
Also, the NTFS partition is showing up as "unallocated" in Disk Manager.

Sounds like the your NTFS partition is either corrupted or was done incrorectly and will most likely need to be redone from within XP. You should be able to just redo the NTFS partition in disk manager without touching the HFS partition. What OS did you use to create the NTFS partition initially? OS X doesn't always do the greatest job with NTFS partitions.

In any case, depending on the games you're playing, running them form an external device is not ideal. Unless you're running an eSATA interface, the external drive will be quite a bit slower than an internal drive. Just a tip.

[rerks]

thanks jeff

sorry for the late reply but i sorted it out. i have an app called NTFS for Mac by Paragon which allows Mac OS X to write to NTFS and also allows Disk Utility to format to NTFS. this corrupted the partition and i reformated it in Disk Manager without disrupting my HFS+ partition. thanks for the help and the tip!