Searcher7 wrote:

>
> Thanks.
>
> I copied that long post of yours for future reference, because I plan
> to get a couple more external drives.(They are usually used and gotten
> via Craigslist or eBay). :-)
>
> I all honesty, I'm amazed that these things can be so complicated.
> That said, I did what Philo said and deleted the partition in "Disk
> Management". It was that easy. Apparently, the first time around I
> didn't get all the options for partition size.
>
> It took three hours to format and now I have 465.76GB NTFS to work
> with.
>
> Thanks again.
>
> Darren Harris
> Staten Island, New York.

Well, what threw me off, was your claim that you could only make the
partition 17.76GB on the first attempt.

What may have happened, is the Mac disk was GPT, and the MBR value
was intended to be "protective". And somehow, the "Protective" value
left room for a 17.76GB partition. It wasn't supposed to leave room
for anything.

Then, after creating that partition, WinXP no longer recognized the fact
it was a GPT disk (MBR lost the 0xEE partition type value, something
you could have seen with PTEDIT32). And maybe then, having overwritten
the MBR with something "WinXP friendly", Philo's idea of just deleting it
and making it again, worked.

If you prepare a disk on the Mac again some time, have a look with PTEDIT32
to satisfy your curiosity, in terms of whether the MBR had a 0xEE partition
type, and whether it leaves room to sneak in a small partition. The
Wikipedia article claims the protection partition declaration is
supposed to cover the entire disk. (I.e. The MBR declaration is a
"fake", intended to scare off GPT-unfriendly OSes.) The fact that you
could make a change to it in WinXP, suggests whatever was written in the
MBR, just wasn't good enough.

This stuff isn't that complicated. Usually, all it takes is some tools
to allow viewing the disk contents, and some good web articles.

The easiest way to pass a disk between WinXP and OSX, is probably to
prep the disk on WinXP and use a regular MBR setup. As far as I know,
OSX can mount FAT32 and NTFS, just like a Linux can, and will play nicely
if you move the WinXP prepared disk back and forth. It would appear
moving the Mac prepared disk, over to WinXP, didn't work out quite as
well. Since I stopped buying new versions of the OS for my old
Mac, there hasn't been much need to follow the file system developments.
In the past, I've just used FAT32 for this (moving files Mac <--> PC).

Paul

Searcher7 wrote:

>
> Thanks.
>
> I copied that long post of yours for future reference, because I plan
> to get a couple more external drives.(They are usually used and gotten
> via Craigslist or eBay). :-)
>
> I all honesty, I'm amazed that these things can be so complicated.
> That said, I did what Philo said and deleted the partition in "Disk
> Management". It was that easy. Apparently, the first time around I
> didn't get all the options for partition size.
>
> It took three hours to format and now I have 465.76GB NTFS to work
> with.
>
> Thanks again.
>
> Darren Harris
> Staten Island, New York.

I found another reference here, to working with Protective MBR disks.
It's interesting that they make the distinction that a Macintosh boot
disk would be GPT, implying that Macintosh data disks (something you're
using for backup) might not be that way.

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/cr...p?DocId=207837

In their sample screenshot of Disk Management, they show what a Protective MBR
disk would look like. You couldn't have had that present on the disk.
I don't know what you had, but it probably wasn't exactly like this.

http://support.seagate.com/kbimg/207837-1.jpg

Paul

On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 03:48:02 -0700 (PDT), Searcher7 <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>I plugged a MAC-formatted 500GB external hard drive into the USB port
>of my Windows XP PC which has 20GB and 40GB "C" and "D" drives.
>
>In "Disk Management" I was only given an option to set up a new
>partition. Now the drive shows as only 17.76GB.
>http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...Management.jpg
>
>Can anyone tell me what I did wrong or should do next?
>
>Thanks.
>
>Darren Harris
>Staten Island, New York.

Windows's Disk Management leaves a lot to be desired.

Download "Free Magic Partition"
Plug the external drive in and run the program. Delete ALL the partitions on the USB drive,
then create a new partition and format it (Quick).

http://www.partitionwizard.com/index.html

Unk

On Oct 20, 6:01*am, Paul <nos...@needed.com> wrote:
> Searcher7 wrote:
>
> > Thanks.
>
> > I copied that long post of yours for future reference, because I plan
> > to get a couple more external drives.(They are usually used and gotten
> > via Craigslist or eBay). :-)
>
> > I all honesty, I'm amazed that these things can be so complicated.
> > That said, I did what Philo said and deleted the partition in "Disk
> > Management". It was that easy. Apparently, the first time around I
> > didn't get all the options for partition size.
>
> > It took three hours to format and now I have 465.76GB NTFS to work
> > with.
>
> > Thanks again.
>
> > Darren Harris
> > Staten Island, New York.
>
> I found another reference here, to working with Protective MBR disks.
> It's interesting that they make the distinction that a Macintosh boot
> disk would be GPT, implying that Macintosh data disks (something you're
> using for backup) might not be that way.
>
> http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/cr...h.jsp?DocId=20....
>
> In their sample screenshot of Disk Management, they show what a Protective MBR
> disk would look like. You couldn't have had that present on the disk.
> I don't know what you had, but it probably wasn't exactly like this.
>
> http://support.seagate.com/kbimg/207837-1.jpg
>
> * * Paul

No it definitely wasn't.

I've notice that things are not always exactly the way the
manufacturers say they are. :-)

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.