No boot on XP due to an hfs partition?

[neodoru]

Hello,

I have a windows partition on a HDD, and another partition formated as hfs (just for data ... no Mac os system). when the hfs partition has been created, windows didn't boot anymore, when I made the win partition active, the hfs partition couldn't be accessed by macos.

Does anyone knows how to keep both "alive"?

Thanks in advance

[Dermatea]

I'm slightly confused here. So you have one HDD with Windows on it, then you decided to add a HFS partition. How did you add the HFS partition? You couldn't boot into Windows after the partition was made so maybe you didn't create it properly and messed up your boot record, causing Windows to not recognize its own partition. Then you said that when you made your Windows partition active, the HFS partition couldn't be recognized by your Mac OS, which I'm assuming, is on another HDD? If so, there seems to be a huge conflict going on here. I don't think it was such a good idea to cross-mix two completely different file-formatted partitions between two operating systems on only one HDD. How each operating system prioritizes its drives may cause your other partitions to be unbootable in the other operating system. It's just my guess but maybe you should just put the HFS partition on say, a third HDD? That might clear some things up.

[neodoru]

First thanks for the answer!

 

Ok sorry, I was a bit tired at that hour!

I'll try to explain it better.

I have 2 HDDs, one (hd0) contains MacOS (Leopard) and the second (hd1) contains WinXP. On the second hdd (hd1 - the one with windows on it) I have created a partition for mac data ("MacOSData" kits, downloads, sh*t like this), making it hfs (in windows with PartMagic, I have formated as FAT32 and then, in Mac, I have converted it as hfs). After making the partition hfs, windows became unbootable, probabily the windows partition was not active anymore, so I made it active again. Windows became bootable - of corse, but the mac data partition (MacOSData) wasn't accessible anylonger in Leopard. Please note that the hdd containing MacOS (hd0) hasn't been modified at all!

So, I have two questions:

1. Is any hfs partition automatically made active?

2. Is there any way to have them both on the same hdd, without making the macdata partition FAT32?

 

I hope I didn't forget anything this time

 

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Dermatea]

I don't know if this will work but try booting with your Leopard disc, and start Disk Utility. Completely erase your hd1 and create two partitions. Format the first one as HFS Journaled, and the second one as FAT DOS compatible. Then reinstall Windows on your FAT partition, and maybe try a different filesystem for Windows like NTFS. Leopard should recognize the two partitions allowing you to use your HFS Journaled partition as extra storage. If not, the FAT filesystem is already backwards compatible with HFS, allowing you to read and write to FAT32 formatted partitions from within Leopard. So there isn't a need for converting to HFS if all you're looking for is a little extra storage. And you can use MacDrive to access HFS partitions in Windows but that's probably something different. But like I said earlier, the best solution if you're hard-pressed for more storage is just invest in a third HDD. You can use your hd1 drive as a single HFS partiton and your third smaller drive can be used for Windows seeing as how it isn't your primary OS.

[mtotho]

IDK if this will work, but in the program 'easybcd' there is an option to repair HSF+ partition error. You may want to consider giving that a go... of course to use this program, you would need vista or xp installed. good luck.. also errors like this are usually do to the swapping of active partitions.. which this error rarely becomes of it.. there are of course other factors which i am not aware of.. but thats how it has happened to me before.