How to have two partitions in windows 7 using bootcamp?

Question

Hello everybody,
I've just recently bought a new MacBook Pro, I'm not very familirar with Macintosh. I installed windows 7 using bootcamp but the problem is that I just can see one partition in which I've installed windows.
actually, I want to partition my 500GB disk to three different partitions as following:
1) 70GB for Mac
2) 80GB for Windows
3) 350GB for Data
so that I can have third partition both in Mac and Win.
I searched internet and I found a few documents about it and I followed the instructions but I had no luck of success. one of the instructions I tried is: http://davidseah.com/index-ee.php/wikilab/Creating-2-Windows-Partitions-with-Boo t-Camp/
Any suggestion would be appreciated.

Answer 1

1: Those instructions at the link are severely outdated. Don't use them.
2: Apple expects users to have one Bootcamp partition, one OS X Lion partition and that's it and that's all they are going to hold your hand on.
(note: there is also a hidden EFI and a Lion Recovery Partition also on the drive.)
Anything beyond that is getting into major geek terror-tory.
Of course it's possible, I had my 15" with 7 partitions and booting 4 other operating systems from Lion, Snow, Windows, Linux (with a Linux Swap and a exFAT data). But I had to wipe the entire drive, set up the partitions install a alternate EFI boot program (a program that resides in firrmware) and then install each OS in each partition.
Since your new to Mac, you should really hold onto Apple's hand and use either a external drive formatted either FAT32(MSDOS) for under 4 GB files sizes (preferred) or exFAT for over 4GB files (not preferred but necessary) in Apple's Disk Utility.
Windows is as you know, formatted NTFS and OS X is formatted HFS+ Journaled as their partition data formats.
There is software for Windows called MacDrive which will read and write HFS format, and there is software from Tuxera that will allow OS X to read NTFS format.
There is a security issue allowing Windows to read HFS, but that should do transferring the small amount of files your going to be using in both operating systems.
OS X, like Windows, is going to expect files to be in each respective User folders of Music, Pictures and so forth when you open save dialog boxes, open finder windows, open certain programs and so forth. So ideally it's not best to share a partition or really have the user data on another partition at all.
I know it's a practice on Windows machines to partition data away from boot/programs to reduce defragmentation, on OS X it's not as necessary (except in special cases) as all 2GB sized files and below are written to one space on the drive (if there is room of course)
Windows 7 still needs to be defragged, however it can be schedualed and you can watch the progress. If you install WIndows, perform all the updates, then install programs, then finally any files you do keep there, it should stay optimized for a quite awhile. Ditton on the OS X side.
If your going to sharing a grreat quantity of files between the two OS's, use a external drive.
Apple installs a hybrid MBR in the Bootcamp partition for Windows to use to interact with the GUID partition table (GPT) it uses.