Installing Windows 7 and Data sharing partition

[shamanana]

Yup! That's what it says... It's nicely greyed out In Disk Utility...

 

[adamsmasher]

Ahh, Snow Leopard wants everything in GUID

You'll have to wipe the drive, erase the drive and make it GUID with two partitions. Then you'll have to install Windows 7 on one partition (it's important to do this first because Windows will alter the MBR of the disc and would screw up the chameleon bootloader. Also, even though the disc is formatted as GUID it still has a Master Boot Record even though it's not actually formatted as Master Boot Record. Confusing, eh? ). Once windows is installed you can then install Snow Leopard and Chameleon on the other drive. Whew.

 

[shamanana]

No worries. My situation is like this. I already have Snow Leopard installed on a separate disk (1TB). So I wanted Windows 7 on a smaller disk and I got a 500GB. But then I figured I didn't really need all those 500GB for Windows... I mean... seriously... 7 or not... it's still windows
And that's why I decided during the Windows install to leave a major portion of the disk unallocated so I could later format it with Snow and use it as storage (cause there is NEVER enough storage). So now I basically have FREE space that can't be used...

Is there any way I could format it with Windows 7 somehow (windows wouldn't happen to have a GUID option for me, would it? ) and then re-format it again in Snow...)

My Snow Leopard is safe

 

[adamsmasher]

I don't know... maybe you could use Gparted?

 

[shamanana]

You'll have to wipe the drive, erase the drive and make it GUID with two partitions. Then you'll have to install Windows 7 on one partition (it's important to do this first because Windows will alter the MBR of the disc and would screw up the chameleon bootloader.

Tony, you are missing a smiley here... one of those using a hammer hitting itself on the head
Basically this means I could just follow tony's guide on dual booting from the same hard drive, but install Windows only and leave the other GUID partition for storage....

I am still wondering about something though... do I still have to uncheck "Ignore ownership on this volume" and is it important whether the left empty GUID partition is still the top one or not. And I am assuming I would skip Steps 3 and on since I wouldn't be installing Snow Leopard on that partition anyways.

Feel free to correct any and all BS I spewed here above and thanks once again

 

[wlp5]

Regarding a question from the previous page, the reason windows was not giving you the option to format the drive is because that space was not partitioned. I would suspect that you can create the partition through windows and then try to format it again from OSX but I haven't tried it and it might not work. It should be easy to check if you haven't erased everything. Otherwise, go ahead and erase everything and make all the partitions from OSX before installing windows like it was suggested by adamsmasher.

 

[tonymacx86]

Tony, you are missing a smiley here... one of those using a hammer hitting itself on the head

 

[adamsmasher]

Give wlp5's suggestion a try - maybe you'll be able to use it once windows has formatted it as something other than empty space. I have a feeling SL won't like that's not GUID, but who knows?

 

[shamanana]

Tony, you are missing a smiley here... one of those using a hammer hitting itself on the head

Thank you Tony, I really really needed it! I guess when people age they get too fixated on a single idea and don't realize that the solution is staring at them from the side of the road

I would suspect that you can create the partition through windows and then try to format it again from OSX but I haven't tried it and it might not work. It should be easy to check if you haven't erased everything. Otherwise, go ahead and erase everything and make all the partitions from OSX before installing windows like it was suggested by adamsmasher.

And that's exactly what I decided to do this morning. And since I couldn't find a solution to formatting it from inside the windows I unplugged first my SL disk (you never know...), popped in that Windows 7 installation disk and got to the page with drives and guess what, that drive cannot be formated (greyed out option) - unless you want to do a whole New partitioning on it and installing more Windows... pleeeaze... one is more than enough!

And so I went back to my trusted old friend - the Disk Utility, erased it, gave it a GUID flavor and partitioned it according to tony's guide. Interestingly there was no need to un-check that Ownership option...?
Unplugged SL disk, installed Windows on the third partition. Done. And because of the name of the disk it boots every time into SL, unless I am in a self torturing mood and and then I press F12 and look for Windows...

Thank you everyone!

m(__)m

...Did I mention that I have 420 something GB of extra Usable space ?

 

[wlp5]

Forgive me if I'm saying the obvious but in order to format a partition you need to create it first. Formatting unpartitioned space is not possible unless of course the OS decides to simplify your choices and figures out that you want to create a partition and format it afterwards. I am not surprised that windows did not let you format the space but what you could try is to create a partition on the space first. I believe windows calls it volumes now, so "create a simple volume" is what you were looking for. Again, hope you're not offended, it just wasn't clear from your messages that you understood the difference.

Doesn't matter anymore since you did from scratch, glad it worked out.