thanks for your suggestion. I was thinking along the same lines of creating a fat32 partition and then telling diskutility to format it for apple. Just to clarifiy, i do have a little over 630GB of unformatted space. My issue is that when it's time to select the volume scheme, if I leave my current scheme, which is basically my two window 7 partitions and the unallocated space, diskutility cant do anything with the unallocated space as it's grayed out. However, If I select per say 3 partitions, the unallocated space is no longer grayed out and I can go ahead and format it. I dont feel comfortable doing that, as it simply divides the entire drive into three partitions completely ignoring the existing partitions and their size which are 200MB & 350GB respectively.