Bootcamp, Vista, OSX, and my Music Collection

I bought a MBP 15" w/a 160GB hard drive and have a couple questions about Bootcamp. Currently I have two 80GB partitions with OSX on one and Vista on the other.

- I have 40GB in music that I want to load onto the computer.
- In Vista I cannot see the Mac Partition
- In OSX I can see the Windows partition but I have "read only" access. For example I am able to drag a Vista wallpaper onto my Mac desktop, but I cannot delete anything from, or move anything to, the windows partition.

I would like to copy my music library to one partition that can be accessed in both OSes. That rules out using OSX since Window can't see it.

Does anyone know if iTunes/Windows Media Player NEEDS to have read/write access in order to work properly?

Thanks for any help/advice you can offer.

-Matt

 

Found this excerpt...makes sense...but is frustrating:

Currently, while Mac OS X can use FAT volumes, it can only read NTFS disks, not write to them. That means you'll be able to see the files in your Windows XP partition on the Mac desktop, but you won't be able to copy files into Windows unless you use FAT. However, FAT only supports 32 GB partitions. If you need a partition larger than that, you have to use the NTFS format.

Windows can't natively read Mac drives either, although there are third party tools that allow this. The simplest solution to transferring files between the two environments is the one used by Apple for delivering drivers: burn a CD. For regularly copying files between the two, use an external, FAT formatted Firewire or USB drive, such as a common thumb drive.


So since we all know Vista is a big fat pig, I dont think 32GB will be enough space for it to 'breathe' esp with Office 2007 and all my other necessary apps.

-Matt

 

Or, perhaps this would work?

<start over>
-160 GB Capacity
-Bootcamp used to create 100GB partition for Vista and 60Gb for OSX
-Vista advanced options allow to resize partition
-Resize to something like 70GB, leaving 30GB unallocated
-Install Vista
-Once installed, boot into it, go to Logical Disk Manager, and allocate the remaining 30GB to a new partition that utilizes FAT32.
-Both Windows and Mac volumes can see the new partition and read/write since it's FAT32.

Would that work?

-Matt

 

it sounds good on paper but I'm not sure that you can resize the partition that you are running Vista from whilst you are in it. (if that makes sense) ... it might be that you need Bootcamp to create a 70gb partition from OSX from the outset, install Vista to that then from Vista make a new partition from the unused space in FAT32 format..

I think that the idea is sound just you might need to juggle the order of how you do things!

I've never tried this but I'm pretty convinced you can't resize the partition you are actually in? I'm quite welcome to being proved wrong of course lol

 

Use macdrive. Allows you to see mac drives from windows. I have my mp3s on the osx partition and i can access them from windows perfectly. If you do delete any mp3s from the mac side you do have to remove them from your pc itunes list. Macdrive allows for read and write but I havent tried editing mp3s from the pc side and seeing if the changes are reflected. I would assume they do.

 

MacDrive is awesome, but unfortunately it costs $50 . So I don't know if the original poster is willing to purchase it.

Anyway, mattedmunds, if you are willing to shell out $50, MacDrive works very well.