Partition drive one for osx extended journaled and one for ntfs

I have attached this question to a previous similar post but have had no responce. The responce to this previous post (how to use one drive for MAC and Windows) pointed to article 3865 which indicates that whole drive should be formatted in FAT32. I would prefer not to use this - I am lead to believe it is not as reliable as newer file systems and I have found MAC Time Machine to be quite temperamental so much prefer to us the proper MAC format. I want to use one 2TB My Passport drive to backup my MAC (10.8.2) and my wife’s Windows 7 laptop. Can I partition and format the drive - approx 1TB as OSX Extended journled and another partition approx 1TB as NTFS.

Note Previous experience with partitioning external drive using ‘MAC disk utilities, partition’ was not effective? 

Would appreciate your guidance

Yes formatting the drive on FAT32 will allow you to use with Mac and Win.

I prefer to use applications that allow me to overcome the file system limitations.

You can format on your Mac and then install this app on Windows Catacombae - HFSExplorer

Or, you can leave the drive as NTFS and use NTFS-3G

Wizer thank you for your responce and appreciate your technical knoledge. I would much prefer to use standard formats for the drive:

  • I would want to partition the drive so that Time Machine does not just eat up all available space. 
  • When I have problems with Time Machine and call Apple they will say not our issue drive should be formatted as MAC Extended Journeled 
  • I do not need to swap files across the two formats 
  • The FAT32 file size could catch me out down the line

Can I equaly partition and format the drive in OSX Extended Journaled and NTFS? 

I am trying to migrate away from another manufacturers very unreliable NAS which has tied me up with endless technical issues. I travel extensively otherwise I would buy two 1TB drives. 

Thanks for the advice

Hi first time machine does not support fat32 that’s why it wont work. What i can advice you to do is partition the drive in 2 using mac then reformat the 2nd partition to ntfs using windows if you do not want to format it to fat32. I believe this will work just fine.