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Repartition NTFS Drive - *without* losing data

O

oli.watts

macrumors member
Original poster
Hi,

My girlfriend has an external HDD formatted to NTFS (obviously unwritable by Mac OS X).

I want to add an extra partition to the drive that my Mac can write/read for backup and storage.

I assume if I repartition the drive thru Disk Utility i'll lose *all* the data, which is something I can't have happen.

Does anyone have any experience in having done this before, or can recommend any third-party apps to do it.

Additionally (sorry for all the Q's!) if I connect the HDD to a router through a USB > Ethernet adaptor, will it show on the network, or does that depend on the drive?

Thanks for all your help guys,

Oli
 
You need to move the data off of the drive and back it up else where to do what you want to do. the way data is stored on a hard drive prevents it from really being possible for what you want to do.
 
oli.watts said:
Additionally (sorry for all the Q's!) if I connect the HDD to a router through a USB > Ethernet adaptor, will it show on the network, or does that depend on the drive?
Click to expand...

This will not work with any drive unless:

1) The drive is designed to be networkable, so contains it's own NAS server and drivers for the USB stick/ethernet stick

2) The USB/Ethernet stick is the controller here and has drivers for the drive (easy) and it's own NAS server (very unlikely unless it is a NAS server with ethernet ports which does not sound like what you described)

You have to remember USB is a master/slave kind of thing: one end needs a lot of smarts to make the dumb end work. You are trying to connect two dumb ends with no smart bit. And also remember that just because it has an ethernet port does not mean it is network accessible. You need something to provide a standard server interface to allow the clients to talk to the device over the network.
 
Partition Magic is your friend here. You can resize the partition on the fly (well with a reboot) then format the free space as you see fit.
Though to be fair the price of disk these days you could probably buy an external 500Gb drive for what any software would cost you.
 
Thanks for your responses chaps, really useful, especially about the NAS stuff (should have realised that)...

To further pick your brains, can you recommend any suppliers that might be able to provide a networkable drive? I'm on a bit of budget so the cheaper the better 🙂

Thanks again!!
 
oli.watts said:
Hi,

My girlfriend has an external HDD formatted to NTFS (obviously unwritable by Mac OS X).


Oli
Click to expand...

Not true. You can use MacFUSE with the NTFS-3G plug-in, although write speeds are a fraction of native. It is tolerable for daily use as long as you are not transferring GBs. Useful if you want to write to your Bootcamp partition under OS X

MacFUSE

NTFS-3G
 
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