USB, Firewire, Four Primary Drives, Clone Wars and Retrospect

[Obeechi]

Okay, its our daily dilema special...

Can't drive with Firewire? No problem take the Bus, the early morning USB...

I was smart. I partitioned my external into 8 partitions, all made with OSX, in primary.

Ejected firewire connection. Connected USB. Nothing. Tried again. Died again (nothing).

With USB connected, powered down the external then resumed power. This made the device drive install.

Now its mounted.

However, Vista only reads four of the primary drives. One of which is the EFI 200MB partition.

So now what?

Partition 0 for EFI

Partition 1 for Clone of OSX.

Partition 2 for Clone of Windows

Partition 3 for Retrospect backup, with Data as well

0 + 1 +2 + 3 = 4

Thats four primaries. The rest are unread by Windows (unseen children).

So can I do that, meaning, combine Retrospect backup (set ; it's a file...) with Mac Data, and also Windows Data (saved to HFS+ with MacDrive) all in the same parition?

[Obeechi]

What I meant was 'I was smart, but really I was dumb, since I forgot the limitation of four primary partitions for an MBR"... However, this is an external drive, with bootable clones on it... and was partitioned using OSX Disk Utility... using GUID Partition Map...

So.. do I really need the EFI 200MB partition..

Should I use a third party partitioning utility instead?

I'm going to use both SuperDuper and WinClone. Is it okay to keep Retropsect Backup Sets in the same partition as Data (and save data to HFS from both OSX and Vista using MacDrive; might try both Windows and Mac versions of Retrospect using MacDrive.. )

Or.. ... should I go ahead and keep 8 partitions, and let them be accessed by OSX... Is there a way to mount some of the partitions of an external drive to Vista and then to mount the remaining partitions to OSX... in fact.. could you mount the Vista partitions using USB, and the HFS partitions via Firewire (of the same drive)...