How to Create a FAT32 Partition in MacBook under Vista Beta 2

After I made my MacBook dual boot with Vista, I found that the files I save under OS X partition cannot be accessed under Vista. One solution is to install MacDrive under Vista, but it’s not free. It would be nice if I can create a FAT32 partition so that both OS X and Vista has read/write access to it. One new feature of Vista is shrink or extend volume(partition) on the fly. I tried to use that feature to create a FAT32 partition and it works flawlessly. Here is what I did.

  1. Click on Start button. Right click on Computer and select Manage to bring up Computer Management.
  2. In Computer Management console, click on Disk Management to select it.

    disk_management.jpg

  3. Right click on Volume (C:) and select Shrink Volume….

    shrink.jpg

  4. Enter the amount you need. In this dialog, I entered 5120 MB.

    shrink_dialog.jpg

  5. After a couple of minutes, you can see that a new unallocated partition is created at the end of the drive.

    new_partition.jpg

  6. Right click on this partition and select New Simple Volume… . Follow New Simple Volume Wizard to format this partition as FAT32.

    fat32.jpg

  7. Wait for a few minutes and you are done.

    done.jpg


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3 Comments

  1. To amida168:

    How did you manage to get Mac OS X to see the new partition? After creating the new partition under Vista (RC1 Build 5600), my Mac still displayed only the original C: drive with the same partition size as before even though Windows Vista reflected the change. Did you run disk repair under “Terminal” to fix this problem?

  2. After I created the partition, OS X just recognized it after reboot. I didn’t run anything to repair it. However, I was using Beta 2 and I haven’t tested it under RC1.

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