Advice on Partitioning Mac/PC

[scruwys]

Ok, since this has a lot to do with operating systems, I thought I would post here.

I'm at a bit of predicament. I own a 60GB Mini Mac (Intel-based processor). I do most of my word processing, graphic design, and programming on this computer. The only thing is that I also want the ability to play a few simple computer games (i.e. Counter-strike, Half-life, etc.). Now, I have a 500GB External Harddrive (I'm not positive on the RAM to be honest, but it transfered 14 GB of music in about 45 minutes). I was wondering if it would be possible to partition my Mac in order to run OS X and Windows.

Now I thought maybe it was possible to either run OS X from the Mac Harddrive and Windows from the Harddrive, and then keep the files in both. Or I thought maybe I could run OS X and Windows OS from my Mac and keep ALL of the files on the external harddrive. Now I have NO idea if this is possible, that's the reason why I am posting here, so don't rant or whatever. I just want to know if it's possible, and in which manner I'd have to do it.

Thanks for your help!

 

[PunterCam]

Yeah, it's all very simple. Download bootcamp and use it to partition half of your 60gb hard drive to windows (use a step by step guide like http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2006/04/installing_windows_xp_on_our_i_1.html). Once this is all done you can choose what operation system you want to boot into on startup, and if you hold 'alt' as the computer makes its little 'chime' noise you can select what O/S to boot from.

After this you can partition the external hard drive, half with NTFS (for windows) and half for OSX (whatever format it uses). This way you'll be able to access half the external drive in each O/S, and install your games etc... Or, (and this 'or' makes everything much easier), you can just format the external drive in fat32, which while not as efficient as NTFS, is readable my both windows and osx (so you don't have to partition).

On the other hand, if you only plan on playing the occasional game of counter strike and half life, you could simply use the remaining 20gb left on the windows partition, that's up to you.

The only problem with gaming on a mini will be the reletively low graphics power (I think they have 64mb graphics cards), but half life 2 is very well programmed and should run well enough.

Also, if you want to share files between the O/s's (you can't see the internal osx hard drive in windows, and you can only read from the windows hard drive in osx) you need to buy a program called 'macdrive'. I've done without though.

It all works very very well surprisingly, just don't let yourself get sucked in by windows, I bought my mac pro to be done with it, and now I use windows 99% of the time!