I just purchased a new 21.5" iMac and would like to install Windows 7 on a 500GB Boot Camp partition. I would like to use exFAT as the file system on this partition given it's advantages, but I'm unclear whether Boot Camp Assistant will allow me to do this.

The latest Snow Leopard has added support for formatting partitions in exFAT with Disk Utility. Will Boot Camp Assistant force me to format in NTFS, or can I just install into an exFAT partition without formatting first?

I've never used Boot Camp Assistant before and I'm a little uncertain about how this will work out.

Anyone out there done a Windows 7 install using exFAT before?

Rick,

This LINK may help answer most of your questions.....as I read the comments that followed, it looks to me like your answer will be to use exFAT for your 500gb Bootcamp partition.

FWIW, my personal experience is with WinXPsp3 on a FAT32 32gb partition.

My understanding is that you can do this, if you want to. I'm not really quite sure why you'd want to, though. What advantages do you see over using NTFS?

Mainly that I can write to the volume while using OS X, since NTFS is not writeable from OS X without using a driver like MacFUSE/NTFS-3G (free, but tricky to install?) or Paragon NTFS ($19.95).

I went ahead and installed Win7 using NTFS on a 300GB partition, so maybe I'll trying using MacFUSE. Either that, or I'll just use a USB stick formatted as FAT32 to transfer data back and forth.

macfuse is easy to use and install. the only tricky part is there are two things to download. macfuse, and an ntfs fuse plug for it. but both are easy to install.

I use this fuse which is free if you don't want the "premium support".

The only issue I have with these is they attempt to mount my boot camp volume, which was originally made to boot with boot camp, which has been converted to parallels. parallels hides it, and the fuse grumbles when I restart because it can't mount it. Other than that it works beautiful.

In my hands this is a 15 day limited trial version. How did you arrange for an unlimited free version?

hmmm I've had it for quite some time now, maybe the old version grandfathered me in? It doesn't ask for anything nor do I see any registration information.

It does offer an "upgrade to Tuxera NTFS for Mac" option in its prefs pane however. It says I'm running "NTFS-3G 2010.1.16"

Try it for a few weeks and see what it says?

I did, and at the end of the trial period it said what all time-limited trial software does in these circumstances: time's up or pony up.

Tuxera no longer directly provides links to the free version. Instead, the free version is downloaded from the Sourceforge repository or from sites like MacUpdate. You can download the free NTFS MacFUSE plugin here.

I think I ran into this error when I tried to use MacFUSE because I also have Parallels installed. After that experience I decided to trash MacFUSE for good.

I've found an even better solution that works for me. I use a 16GB SD card I had lying around formatted as exFAT that allows me to transfer files between OS X and Win 7. I just leave it mounted all the time in each OS.

I think Parallels has the ability to transfer files between them too, but when I tried to use it the speed was agonizingly slow. I prefer booting into Win 7 anyway and just use Parallels as a virtual machine for Windows XP, it runs just fine.

Now, if I want to get really tricky, I may try to partition that SD card into two volumes. I'll use one of them as a ReadyBoost volume for faster disk caching and the other volume will then be used for file transferring. Perhaps that's a topic for another thread though.