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I am going to be installing Vista Enterprise on a new MacBook Pro 17". Can I simply make a fat32 partition and install Vista to it or do I absolutely have to use NTFS for Vista Enterprise? Since EFI cannot view NTFS partitions, how are we supposed to get around that issue?

 

The users will not need to access the MAC hard drive from windows or vice versa. Just have the option to boot from MAC OS or Vista.

 

I'm doing this at work for my boss's boss...so I don't want to :thumbsup_anim: it up lol.

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More info on NTFS. I have stayed away from Vista, however I would surprised if Vista wouldn't install or run on a Fat 32 partition. XP will run fine on FAT32. The problem is Microsoft with XP did away with the ability to pick FAT32 during the install. You only get the NTFS option to format the new parition you just created. (Blue screen install during XP). When you setup your drive to load Vista/XP on in OSX under boot camp, I believe if you have small partition size, under 20MB or something like that, boot camp will let you pick FAT32, if it's larger, you have to pick NTFS. Again XP could care less between NTFS and FAT32 no matter how large you want the parition. I haven't tried to load Vista yet, so I don't know if it uses the same blue loader screens that XP used during the install process until the first reboot. In those screens you only have a NTFS format option, Microsoft did away with the FAT 32 option with XP, its still there in Win 2000. My main fix was to install partition magic and then reformat my boot partition back to FAT32. There are alot of reasons to keep your boot partition FAT32 mainly for recovery issues.

After I loaded XP on my Macbook pro, I tried to install partionmagic. It install fine, but errored out when you tried to run it, I am sure something to do with the EFI bios and not being able to control the full hard drive. So I just left my MBP, at NTFS. As you pointed out to get between the systems, at boot, you just hit the option key and select the OS to boot to. The OSX side can see the NTFS drive, just can't write to it. The XP side will not see the OSX drive unless you load Macdrive as someone else mentioned.

 

I chose to leave the two alone. My main need was XP, thus I gave XP most of the drive.

 

Paul C

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