I built a Hackintosh and enjoyed using mac OS X but there are few times I needed to use windows to get things done. And using my laptop to do that seem far slower as it has a older configuration compared to my new Intel i7 powered 8 GB RAM desktop. I wanted to install windows 7 on my desktop and ordered a new 1 terabyte WD hard disk from Flipkart as I used 120 GB Samsung SSD while building the hackintosh. 120 GB seems small to have partitions and and installing 2 operating systems.
I partitioned the new WD hard disk and installed windows on it. I planned to use the bigger partition to use it as storage with both windows and mac.
When I formatted partition as NTFS it worked fine with windows and I can access the files from Mac OS X but I could not write to it from OS X. So I formatted it as FAT32 and I could read/write to it from both windows and mac. But still I found a problem.
The new windows installation needed drivers for Ethernet, sound and other hardware and I had those on DVDs. I did not installed a optical drive in my desktop as I have 2 laptops with optical drives and I can share the DVD drive of these laptops with my desktop. As the Ethernet driver was missing I could not connect to the laptops/network to use their drives.
I needed to copy the drivers from DVD to Desktop via my laptop. I made ISO images of the disks using powerISO (free version is fine for that). Booted my desktop in mac as it can connect to the network. I accessed the laptop from it and tried to copy the iso image which are more than 4 GB in size to the newly formatted bigger partition on my WD hard disk. There I found the problem. I saw an error that I can not copy file this big in the drive.
I googled why this error and I found that I can not copy files more than 4 GB in a disk that is formatted in FAT32. DAMN!
After some googling I figured to use disk in both mac and windows and also to have it store files >4 GB I needed to format it in exFAT format. exFAT format will work both in windows and mac, and also in Linux as well. Now a new problem
When I tried to format it with mac there was no option for exFAT and same goes with the windows 7.
I new windows command prompt can do the trick.
I opened the command prompt and typed:
format /?
This showed me the options to format disk. And the final command that did the trick for me was:
format d: /FS:exFAT
Here "d:" is the drive I was trying to format. Change it accordingly.
It took a long time to get formatted but finally I have a disk that I can use with both mac and windows and also store large files.
Hope this help few
