Selecting an Apple Boot Camp disk format

Posted May 15th, 2006
Related entries: Mac

I recently installed Boot Camp on my new Intel iMac, and it works fabulously. The big dilemma that I (and others it seem) have is how to best allocate the drive space between the Mac and Windows partitions. So many variables to deal with. I want to have enough disk space in Windows to get my work done, but I’m also stingy and don’t want to give away too much of my Mac drive’s space since it is my primary operating system. In this post I’ll try to explain what I learned and what I came up with.

How much drive space does Boot Camp need?

A basic installation of Windows XP Pro takes about 5 gigs, so that’s my baseline. Add in Visual Studio, Office, Firefox, and so on gets it up around 10-15 gigs. For my needs, this is fine but I still want some slack space available for smaller apps, documents, and media files. Ripping DVDs or any other disk intensive activity means you might need substantially more. Then, there’s the filesystem type issue, NTFS or FAT32?

Should I use NFS or FAT32?

Windows has two different filesystem choices. FAT32 (the “old way”) and NTFS (the “new way”). In case you aren’t aware of the tradeoffs from choosing one or the other, here they are briefly:

Converting from FAT32 to NTFS


One bit of good news is that if you initially configured a drive as FAT32, and then decide that you want or need to convert the drive to NTFS you can easily do so without losing your data. Their is a built in conversion function in Windows that will do this for you. From your command prompt, issue this command:

convert C: /fs:ntfs

More details are available from Microsoft. Note, there is no easy going back from this step! (See below)

Converting from NTFS to FAT32

What if you want to go the other way, converting your nice fast, modern NTFS filesystem to FAT32? A little harder, but still possible (as long as your partition is smaller than 32 GB). The strategy here is to create a backup image of the FAT32 filesystem from the Mac side, then recreate the partition as NTFS and restore the image to it.

Use Disk Utility to make an image (dmg) of the Windows drive from MacOS X and safe it on your Mac drive. Then, boot from the Windows XP install disk and reinstall/reformat, selecting FAT32 this time. After the format is complete and it starts to install Windows turn the computer off to abort the process. Now boot back into Mac OS X. What you have done is create a basically blank FAT32 disk. Now you can use Disk Utility to restore the NTFS image you created earlier, restoring the files to the now FAT32 filesystem.

Hey, I didn’t say it would be fun, just possible.

Accessing your Mac drive from within Windows

By default your Mac drive is invisible to Windows. Which is too bad when all your documents and music are on your Mac drive. Plus, in my case it is highly desirable to allow both operating systems to share all of my slack space for music, video, and so forth.

Luckily, all you need is the reasonably priced MacDrive 6 for Windows. This software package provides transparent, integrated support for Mac drives (HFS/HFS+).

You can download a free trial edition from their website. It lasts a measly 5 days, but I guess it doesn’t take long to prove it works. After installing and rebooting your Mac partition appears as a new drive with full read/write access. You don’t use special tools, just the Windows explorer – beauty!

What I ended up with

Being that much of the ASP.NET code I’m working on relies on NTFS, I decided to stick with that. In the modern hardware era, FAT32 just isn’t done and there’s no telling what might explode on me. I create an image size of 30 GB, which means I could use the painful NTFS to FAT32 conversion steps above if I change my mind. This is probably more space than I need, but I can always image and restore later if I have to.

I’m also installing a copy of MacDrive. That will not only let me access my Mac files, but will let me easily communicate between the two worlds. For example, I can rip a DVD under Windows and burn it on the Mac if I need. This turns out to work pretty well.

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2 Responses to “Selecting an Apple Boot Camp disk format”

  1. Jonathan Langdale Says:
    June 13th, 2006 at 6:22 pm

    My solution was to use NFTS and FAT32. But this required using a method other than Bootcamp to partition. I basically had reformat the whole drive initially and re-parition myself with 3 partitions. One for mac, one FAT32 and one NTFS.

  2. Duane Fields Says:
    June 30th, 2006 at 4:05 pm

    As a follow up, I also discovered that Parallels can see your NTFS partition as well!