Bootcamp HFS, NTFS and third FAT32 partition

[TheBug]

Hello All, this is my first post to this forum, hope someone finds it useful.

This is my first Mac and am enjoying it a lot. More in the OSX side than on the XP side.. :D I’ve got a 15” 2.0GHz MBP with 1GB ram & 100GB drive. I’ve been playing with it for a month now, and after a recent repartition of the Hard drive, now have the following partitions in it:

1) 28GB HFS
2) 36GB FAT32
3) 28.8GB NTFS

I have not used any external tools, like rEFIt to help with the partitioning.

Things to prepare for the install:
1) original Mac OSX discs
2) Bootcamp driver disc
3) WinXP SP2
4) Intel chipset drivers, downloaded from Intel (can be found on previous posts or Intel site)
5) External 2-button mouse

Firstly, partitioned the whole drive as one HFS volume and installed OSX 10.4.5. (You don't need to repartitiion if you have a new machine) Upgraded to 10.4.6 and applied all software upgrades as well as firmware fixes.

Installed Bootcamp and used it to create a 30GB (forgot exact size) partition (You can create your bootcamp driver disc here if you do not have one), installed the winxp sp2 CD-ROM and began installation. Took almost forever.

Finishing the install and rebooting several times, went into windows and auto installed the Intel chipset drivers. Rebooted, then inserted the Bootcamp driver disc to install the rest of the drivers. (This part probably doesn’t have much relevance to partitioning, but that’s what I did.)

At this point, I’ve got a 64GB HFS partition and a 28.8GB NTFS partition. This next step is in preparation for the FAT32 partition.

In Windows, right-click on your “My Computer” icon to bring up the “System Properties” window. Click on the “Advanced” tab and from the “Startup and Recovery” section, click on the “Settings” button.

A “Startup and Recovery” window pops up and in the “System startup” section, click on the “Edit” button. The boot.ini file opens in Notepad and you will see something like:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Copy the last line of the text and paste it underneath the last line. In the last line of the text, change the “partition(3)” to “partition(4). The file should read:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

This step allows you to boot windows from the 4th partition, after you have created your FAT32 drive.

Boot back into OSX and from the terminal window, use “diskutil list” to list out the drives you have, dsk0s2 should be your hfs drive and disk0s3 should be your NTFS drive.

To create your FAT32 partition, you will need to use the “diskutil resizeVolume” command, resizing the HFS partition and creating a new partition at the same time. Type the following:

diskutil resizeVolume dsk0s2 28G MS-DOS FAT32 36G

After it finishes, it will ask you to reboot. Reboot back into OSX. Open the terminal and use “diskutil list” and you should see a new ms-dos partition and should display:

/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *93.2 GB disk0
1: EFI 200.0 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 28.0 GB disk0s2
3: Microsoft Basic Data 36.0 GB disk0s3
4: Microsoft Basic Data Untitled 28.8 GB disk0s4

At this point I still cannot use the partition, thus had to use the “diskutil eraseVolume” command. I typed in:

diskutil eraseVolume MS-DOS FAT32 dsk0s3

It said something about the disk being not bootable and so on, and continued to format the drive. After it finished, it mounted on its own, I changed its drive name and was able to use it.

I rebooted the machine, and at the Windows boot up screen, selected the lower option to boot into and was in windows xp again. Here, I went into the “Startup and Recovery” window again and changed the boot.ini file to the following:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Make sure you change the “partition(3)” to “partition(4)” in the “default=multi……..” line as well.

That’s how I did it and am still testing it to see if there are any problems.

Sorry for the long-winded post, but any comments and suggestions much appreciated.

Thanx.

[TheBug]

Me again. I was just booting into OSX and tried to verify the disk using Disk Utility, but was greeted with an error, saying that it couldn't unmount the volume. Is this the beginning of some major disaster? Can anybody shed some light?
TIA

[TheBug]

Am in OSX now, verified disk again, and this time was ok without errors..

[tucdemonic]

diskutil resizeVolume dsk0s2 28G MS-DOS FAT32 36G


diskutil eraseVolume MS-DOS FAT32 dsk0s3



where it says dsk0s3 or dsk0s2 it really needs to be disk0s3 or disk0s2

[TheBug]

Using the resizeVolume command, should be dsk0s2. It resizes the partition to a smaller size and creates another partition at the same time. Since the newly created partition sits between the HFS (dsk0s2) and NTFS partition (now dsk0s4), it is given dsk0s3.
When using the eraseVolume command to reformat the FAT32 partition, you would then want to use dsk0s3.
Does this make sense?

[tucdemonic]

Using the resizeVolume command, should be dsk0s2. It resizes the partition to a smaller size and creates another partition at the same time. Since the newly created partition sits between the HFS (dsk0s2) and NTFS partition (now dsk0s4), it is given dsk0s3.
When using the eraseVolume command to reformat the FAT32 partition, you would then want to use dsk0s3.
Does this make sense?


I understood it in the first place but dsk0 does not exist, it is disk0 you forgot the i in the middle.

and i can say it works flawlessly, have been using it for about a week now and no problems at all.

[TheBug]

Sorry about that.... Thanks.

Still no repartitioning or re-intalling for me too.

[ecjacky]

The unit size of the second FAT32 partition is 32k. That is not good if I have lots of small files. So, I try to format it to NTFS in XP. But, It can't be done. XP say he can't finish it.

OK, I guess that is the partition issue.

I try to move the FAT32 partition to be 4th partition.
first, I make an image by ghost for my XP partition.
and, repartition the 3th partition to 5G and 4th partition to be 40G.
Ghost XP partition back to 3th partition.

Edit the boot.ini for match 3th.

booting it.

and then, I got XP boot screen.

but later, the blue screen show up, it say UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME.

I am sure the boot.ini is correct and the partition table is 3th.

then, try to ghost the same image to 4th partition.

It boot up.

Could anyone know why can't it be 3th partition.

It seems like partition do not match.

Does anyone experience it ?

[tucdemonic]

from my understanding, it has to be the last partition on the drive, that is a limitation of the boot camp.

[Fawlty]

I am getting the same message about UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME when I try to run the Windows XP installer. The installer loads files and does its thing but after the first rebooting of the computer I hold down the alt/option key on the MBP and select the windows drive (not the install CD) as I should this is when I see the blue screen of death, HELP!

I am trying to install Windows in the Fourth partition as boot camp requires but one thing I noticed in the windows Installer is that the fourth partition drive letter is "D" and the third partition drive letter is "C" Shouldn't this be the other way around? Could this be causing my problem?

Because I was using an NTFS partition, I could not write to it from MAC OS to try and fix it so what I did was followed the procedure on booting XP from an external USB hard drive and I was able to bring up Windows this way. So I used this backdoor method to access my boot.ini file