Partitioning External Hardrive

[deelieman]

I have a question about partitioning an external hardrive. what exactly does it do? I have a laptop with windows xp, and a hardrive ,that was required for my course, that is formatted for mac and does not work with windows. I have read that I can partition it to work with both....but all this talk about the size of it confuses me. I want to know what it actually does, and what I can actually do with it. All I want is to be able to edit my videos with the school's macs, put it on the hardrive, come home to my laptop, plug it in and watch or edit further my videos. Can somebody please shed some light on my ignorance. thanks

 

[Raffaz]

All it does is break it into smaller drives, which means ya could have one partition formatted to NTFS for windows and ya other part formatted for ya mac. If for example ya had 100gb ya could partition into 2x50gb etc

 

[mfrostbutter]

Ok, if I understand you correctly you use MAC's at school, you have an XP machine at home and an external HDD, you want to take the files from school (MAC format) and save them to the external HDD so you can view them from you Windows PC. Is that what you are trying to do?

 

[deelieman]

yes...that is what i am trying to do....i don't understand the partitioning it into 2 different sides? does that mean it'll be like having 1 hardrive for a mac, and 1 hardrive for pc, with none of the files being in common? im so confused...all i want is to put stuff on the hardrive (Lacie firewire mini) from whatever computer i want, and be able to access that stuff at any time from any other computer....