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How to partition external hard drive without deleting

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Larka18

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 18, 2013
4
0
Hi,

I have a macbook from about 2006-2007 running leopard, and I'm replacing my internal hard drive as I need more space. Previously I bought an external buffalo hard drive to put some of my files on, the hard drive is 465.65GB. Time machine has told me that to back up onto this all the files on there would need to be deleted, but I heard you can partition an external hard drive to keep your files and have a back up, how would I go about doing this? And would I be able to do it without erasing the files currently on my external hard drive?

Thanks!
 
Weaselboy

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,133
15,596
California
Yes. Follow this guide to shrink the original partition, then add a partition in the now blank space. Use the second partition for your Time Machine backup.
 
Weaselboy

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,133
15,596
California
Larka18 said:
I looked at the guide and tried to do as they say, but my external hard drive won't allow me to resize, only my macintosh HD will, here's a picture of what it looks like on disk utility; http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d41/Larka18/Picture2.png. I hope that makes sense :S.
Click to expand...

Ahh... the problem there is that resize procedure is for the Mac OS Extended (HFS+) drive format that OS X uses. Your drive is now in Windows FAT format. You are going to need to reformat the drive to the Mac format to resize, which of course defeats your purpose because you want to keep the data.

You are going to need to find a temp solution to moving the data off that drive so you can reformat it.
 
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Larka18

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 18, 2013
4
0
Ah, that makes sense, I could move my files to a flash drive couldn't I and then put them back on once reformatted?
 
Weaselboy

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,133
15,596
California
Larka18 said:
Ah, that makes sense, I could move my files to a flash drive couldn't I and then put them back on once reformatted?
Click to expand...

Sure, as long as the flash drive is large enough, that will work fine.

Do you need to share the files with Windows computers also? If so, you might want to make one partition in ExFat for the videos, then the second partition in Mac OS Extended for the Time Machine space. If you don't need to share with Windows computers, I would just make them both in the Mac format.
 
L

Larka18

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 18, 2013
4
0
I don't think I need to share them with a windows computer, I use them only on my macbook, they're just on the external hard drive to save space so photoshop will run :)
 
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