Bootcamp - Create new partition and format in Windows 7

Please do not take it the wrong way. From my perspective, a video may be overkill, but if you can post the GPT and MBR, I can help carrzkiss build it which mimics your working system. And if it can be done without Winclone, even better.

Hi Loner T,

My previous response was specifically for the OP of this topic. Sorry if it sounded a bit gruff (it was).

I already spent a couple of hours today doing what I've stepped out in the previous posts, then spent another hour or so putting the drive back the way I had it. So without going through the process all over again, I can't do a Terminal list of the drive with the extra DOS partitions on it. But there's no doubt it would be what you would expect to see since Disk Utility was used to do all of the partitioning.

Yes, you can do all of this without purchasing WinClone, but then you have to sit through a full, new install of Windows, AND the ridiculous amount of time it takes to download and apply the bazillion updates. Way, WAY faster to backup the current Windows partition using WinClone, and then restoring it when your new partitions are setup. It's all done right from the OS X desktop, and the Windows backup (a disk image) is saved to any other Mac formatted drive it'll fit on. You don't need an NTFS drive to save the Windows backup with WinClone.

Thanks, Kurt. Let me try and set it up and test it if I get a chance this weekend.

@Carr... is there a sense of urgency about this or can this wait for my test?

There is one thing you need to be careful of when setting up multiple partitions. This is true whether you have more than one NTFS partition on the drive or not. And that is the Windows partition can't be any further down than the third logical partition from the top, or you cannot boot from it. So a partition setup that will work would look something like this when done.

The top two are Mac OS Extended partitions. The third is the Win 7 partition restored from WinClone (or installed clean if you wish). The last two are MS-DOS, FAT32 partitions reformatted as NTFS from within Windows.

In your test, is "Files" accessible from both OSX and Win7?

As noted above, I put my drive back to where I had it, and I didn't exactly document everything. But this is the current setup on my first internal drive:

Win 7 can see both Mac OS drives, and all partitions on physical drive two, which are all Mac OS Extended partitions.

Once you install all of the Boot Camp drivers in Windows for your Mac, of course. As always at that point, all Mac drives can be seen while booted into Windows and can be copied from, but not written to.

I think you are 'cheating' a bit. 😉 By using two drives, and spreading filesystems across the two of them, some of the MBR issues are easier to manage.

Your first '5 partitions' setup is what the OP desires. If you do go back to that setup during experimentation, can I request that you post the GPT and MBR. It will be very helpful.

I think you are 'cheating' a bit. 😉 By using two drives

Heheh! Not intentional. I need a lot of space and partitions for various reasons.

Don't know when I'd have the chance to do the setup all over again. Very busy right now, and it will only get busier as our main client starts getting into next year's catalogue production soon.

I had the time over the weekend (a bit here, a bit there) to fully test this. I'm afraid I muddled my earlier posts by including a third drive I used to have in my Mac Pro to handle all of the extra NTFS partitions I was using at the time.

I did try the above where I had the main drive partitioned as Mac, Files (these first two as Mac OS Extended), Win 7 and two exFAT partitions setup in Disk Utility. Booted into Windows and all seemed well except that it wouldn't recognize the existence of the two exFAT drives underneath the Windows partition on the same physical drive. They simply didn't show up. OS X knew they were there, but not Windows.

I knew it wouldn't work, but I figured "What the heck, I'm playing with a fully backed up drive.", restored Windows to the bottom partition and reformatted the two above it as exFAT. No surprise, being further down than third partition from the top, Windows didn't even show up in the Option boot screen as a drive to startup to. From within OS X, the Win partition would show, and you could select it from the Startup Disk icon in the System Preferences, but the Mac would ignore the request on restart and boot back into OS X.

Okay, scratch that. Three's the limit, so I went with a Mac OS Extended partition at the top, the center partition reformatted as exFAT, and Win 7 at the bottom.

No problem booting to Win 7 now, and Windows sees all three partitions on that physical drive from its desktop.

There's really no reason to reformat it as NTFS since Windows would be just as happy using that big space for the game data as exFAT, but I wanted to see if having two NTFS partitions on the same physical drive OS X was on would confuse the Mac's firmware, and reformatted the exFAT drive as NTFS from within Windows.

No problem booting back into OS X, and the OS does recognize two NTFS partitions on the same volume.

Booted back into Windows one more time to check the firmware's ability to handle two NTFS partitions. No problem. Win 7 started up no issue.

So the basic answer is no, you can't have two more NTFS drives besides Windows on the same drive, along with OS X. The only way you could do it would be to erase the Mac partition as NTFS or exFAT while in Windows. But then that's all you'd have on the drive. Two NTFS or exFAT drives as partitions 1 and 2, and Windows as the third partition so it would still boot.

I don't have a Recovery partition on the volume I tested this on, so I don't know if that would make any difference as to how this would behave.

Kurt Lang thanks for spending your time on this. This excellent information to have. On 2013 and later hardware with much-improved EFI support and W8.1 it is possible to have a pure GPT setup on a single disk which avoids the MBR tricks needed otherwise for sharing data.

Kurt Lang wrote:

I don't have a Recovery partition on the volume I tested this on, so I don't know if that would make any difference as to how this would behave.

Yes, it makes a significant difference.

The standard MBR mapping contains #1 as the partition all the way to your OS X location, #2, is the HFS partition, #3 is Recovery HD and #4 is the Bootcamp/Windows. If Recovery is deleted, the #3 slot will accommodate a "shared" file system.

This is the "standard" version...

sudo gpt -vv -r show /dev/disk0

gpt show: /dev/disk0: mediasize=1000555581440; sectorsize=512; blocks=1954210120

gpt show: /dev/disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0

gpt show: /dev/disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: /dev/disk0: Sec GPT at sector 1954210119

start size index contents

0 1 MBR

1 1 Pri GPT header

2 32 Pri GPT table

34 6

40 409600 1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B

409640 1452530904 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

1452940544 1269536 3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

1454210080 992

1454211072 499998720 4 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

1954209792 295

1954210087 32 Sec GPT table

1954210119 1 Sec GPT header

sudo fdisk /dev/disk0

Disk: /dev/disk0 geometry: 121643/255/63 [1954210120 sectors]

Signature: 0xAA55

Starting Ending

#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 409639] <Unknown ID>

2: AF 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 409640 - 1452530904] HFS+

3: AB 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [1452940544 - 1269536] Darwin Boot

*4: 07 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [1454211072 - 499998720] HPFS/QNX/AUX

There is a similar discussion here - Boot Camp repair via Hybrid MBR fix after 5+ partitions which you may want to keep an eye on. This is the closest you can get to a single-drive-shared-file-systems implementation.

This excellent information to have. On 2013 and later hardware with much-improved EFI support and W8.1 it is possible to have a pure GPT setup on a single disk which avoids the MBR tricks needed otherwise for sharing data.

Sounds like a nice improvement, though I don't need it myself.

Yes, it makes a significant difference.

Kind of figured it might, but couldn't test it. Here's another one, though. If there is no Recovery partition on a drive you create a Boot Camp partition for, then you cannot even get a Recovery partition on that drive. Windows is already sitting on the space at the very end of the drive where OS X wants to put the Recovery partition, and it will not put it above the Windows partition. When you attempt to install Lion or later, you get a message about a problem (can't remember the exact wording), but it basically means you won't have a Recovery partition when the install is done.

Here is an example on a Late 2013 rMBP of an EFI Bootcamp.

diskutil list

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.3 GB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 249.7 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

4: Microsoft Reserved 134.2 MB disk0s4

5: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 249.6 GB disk0s5

gpt show: /dev/disk0: mediasize=500277790720; sectorsize=512; blocks=977105060

gpt show: /dev/disk0: PMBR at sector 0

gpt show: /dev/disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: /dev/disk0: Sec GPT at sector 977105059

start size index contents

0 1 PMBR

1 1 Pri GPT header

2 32 Pri GPT table

34 6

40 409600 1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B

409640 487712920 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

488122560 1269536 3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

489392096 32

489392128 262144 4 GPT part - E3C9E316-0B5C-4DB8-817D-F92DF00215AE

489654272 487450624 5 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

977104896 131

977105027 32 Sec GPT table

977105059 1 Sec GPT header

Disk: /dev/disk0 geometry: 60821/255/63 [977105060 sectors]

Signature: 0xAA55

Starting Ending

#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 977105059] <Unknown ID>

2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

Interesting. Must be model specific, as you noted above (newer EFI). If I try to do that, I always get a message that includes (as best as I can recall without actually trying to install OS X again) "some features will not be available". When the install is done, there is never a new Recovery partition in any position.