Best format for hard drive for Windows and Mac?

Posted by Neil on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Neil
Published on 2010-03-12T14:19:39Z Indexed on 2010/03/12 14:27 UTC
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I have a 500 GB USB External Hard Drive. I need four partitions on it, for the following purposes:

160 GB for a bootable backup of my Mac.

160 GB for a bootable backup of my Windows.

11 GB for a bootable Snow Leopard Install Disk

Rest as for file storage.

Now I need a partition table which will get recognised on both Windows and Mac, without needing extra software on Windows, which will let me keep bootable copies of both OS'es, but let me access the file storage from both OS'es.

Currently, I have a GUI Partition Table, with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Partitions for the two backups, Mac OS Extended for the Install Disk, and NTFS for the file storage. While this gets recognised perfectly on my Mac, thanks to an NTFS for Mac driver from Paragon, when connected to Windows, the drive is detected by the machine (listed in Safely Remove USB), but not recognised in Windows Explorer unless I install MacDrive, which is not feasible for me to install on public Windows Machines I might wanna access my storage area on.

Can someone recommend the best combination of formats and software/drivers to get this done seamlessly?

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