I know this thread must already be out there somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it. My apologies.
Background (for those who care): I use Xbox music (Zune) because I get a friendly MP3 when I download and I've had a subscription for seven years now, so I'm grandfathered into the "10 free downloads a month" program with unlimited access to all music. It's a sweet deal and my Zune HD and Zune 30GB are still running strong so I have no reason to switch to iTunes. However, I also have an iPhone and want to be able to download music on Zune and sync it to all devices without an external hard drive needing to be present. This worked flawlessly when I had Windows 7 installed as a VM on my Mac and "Shared Folders" enabled. However, I have an old 2008 Macbook and, though it still holds its own, I decided to install Windows 7 with Boot Camp for increased performance.
I am running Snow Leopard with Fusion 3.x and, as I mentioned above, Windows 7 (Professional) on a Boot Camp partition. I want to basically create a mirrored folder for music (which I download on the Windows OS) that I can access from both OSX and Win7 natively. I've read a lot about creating a 3rd partition with a FAT32 format (the 4GB limitation wouldn't be an issue since my primary concern is music files) and mounting it to both OS's. Sounds great, but Disk Utility won't create another partition (even an 8GB one), likely because I have a Boot Camp partition present? I have no desire to wipe Windows and start from scratch as I literally justgot everything partitioned, installed and updated. There must be another way to do this.
I've heard mention of somehow mapping an OSX folder as a network drive on the Boot Camp partition, but I can't seem to figure out how to get them to talk to each other as if they're separate machines on a network.
I would gladly update to Fusion 5 for $50 if this issue has been resolved since the release of 3.x, but since the root of my problem is Mac's inability to understand NFTS, I don't find that likely. I'd prefer to be able to read & write both ways, but if there is a way for iTunes to just read the Boot Camp drive and access the music to upload it onto my iPhone, I could live with that.
Thanks for reading all this (I think I have included all the details) and thanks in advance for lending a hand.
Cheers,
Logan