iMac - Dual boot Mac OS X and Win XP with Shared Drive

You've just got an iMAC; you want to dual boot it with XP; you want a shared partition where both, Mac and XP can read/write;

you've come to the right place!

The following is for the iMAC 300GB Hard disk, but you'd just need to change the numbers for other sized disks.

Here's what I wanted:

Partition 1: EFI (200M) (already present) <-Dont ever blow this up.

Partition 2: Mac (needs to be resized to 100G)

Partition 3: FAT 32 (to be shared between Mac OS and Win XP;size 166G)

Partition 4: Windows XP (FAT 32) (should be <32g,>

STEP 1 :

Install Mac OS X (if you haven't already) with one partition for the whole disk.

STEP 2 :

Create 3 partitions

(a) original JHFS+

(b) any partition that supports >100 G and not MSDOS (I've used HFS+)

(c) MS DOS partition for windows.

Command : sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 100G "HFS+" "Global" 166G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Windows" 31G

STEP 3 :

Make sure windows thinks it has to format the windows partition

Command : sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk0s4 bs=1m count=100

STEP 4:

Plop the win xp installation CD and reboot

Hit the Alt key during reboot and boot from CD

Once the setup enters the Windows Setup stage and lists the partitions that you can choose XP to be installed in, you should see only C:

If you see D:, you've messed up somewhere.

Format C: using FAT (quick format)

Install windows holding the ALT key everytime a reboot is asked for and booting into windows.

Once windows is installed, plop in the first Mac OS X CD and install bootcamp & drivers for all the devices (i-sight, bluetooth, wifi etc). Luckily, this is all automatic.

STEP 5:

Log into Mac OS and launch the Disk Utility program.

Select the volume called 'Global' and click the Erase tab.

Choose ms-dos as Volume Format and format this partition.

After this, you should be able to see the 'Global' partition in both Mac OS and WinXP.

Have fun!

P.S. Thanks to the folks at wiki.onmac.net for this wonderful article from which much of the above has been adapted.
P.P.S. Baigman shared a http://lifeandeating.blogspot.com /2008/01/imac-dual-boot-mac-os-x-and-win-xp-with.html?showComment=1289876233814#c452012705514538304"> simpler way of doing this. I haven't tried it but let me know if it works well.