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lacie d2

S

starson

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Hi, I recently bought a new Lacie d2 firewire 200 GB hd.

On my PC i partitioned it to 6 fat32 (only one both pc and mac can both work with) partitions.
I would however now like to turn one of those into a mac os extended partition. (for backup and such purposes (system testing and so on))

how can i do this without loosing the data on the other partitions?

any help is greatly appreciated.
thank you in advance
 
I hope you didn't stump the whole board...

...because I'm interested to know the answer.

I would have thought (although I'm not in front of my Mac now) that Disk Utility would have given you an option to choose a format when you selected a single disk partition to be initialized, allowing you to re-format a single partition rather than only the entire volume.

I'm pretty confident that there was another thread that concluded that there's no dynamic partition re-sizing for OS X yet, so if this involved changing the partition size, you may be out of luck....
 
it could be that i was just a little to uncreative.

i was able to erase the partition, however i was not able to "format" the free space after i erased it.

maybe that would be a way to do it.

there is one partition with about 32 gigs entirely free...
 
Disk Utility will let you reformat an individual partition just fine. Deleting the partition is something different entirely.
 
ok, could you help me out a little?

what exactly do i need to do to format the existing fat 32 partition with disk util into a mac partition?

thank you.
 
Open Disk Utility
Select the partition from the list on the left
Click on the "Erase" tab (top, center)
Select format type (Mac OS Extended), rename the partition (if you want), click "Erase" button
Done
 
I have done as you said and everything seems to be fine, except for that it doesn't mount it and upon trying to activate it. it seems to stand still and not do anything

any ideas?
 
What's not "mounting it"? OS X?

Are the FAT32 partitions mounting?

I'm not sure what you mean by activate in this context.
 
well, i mean i see all the fat32 partitions on my desktop, but not the erased mac os extended volume.

by activate i meant thetop button under options.

just trying to find a way to access this volume now

it seems stuck after i click on activate with erasing "starting drivers" (that is a direct german to english translation)

thank you so much for your help
 
Hmmm, the Options button is greyed out for me.

diskutil.gif
 
OK, it's odd that the partition you're trying to format isn't showing up with the Firewire icon like the rest of the partitions on that drive.

Can you get a screenshot of the partition scheme of the whole drive, with that partition selected.

Like this:
 

Attachments

OK, that's really strange. It's seeing that disk as one giant disk without partitions. If you look at mine you see how it has separate rows for each partition in that column.

Do you already have documents on the rest of the partitions? If not, I'd start from scratch and repartition it in OS X and go from there.
 
yes, i saw that difference as well.
unfortunately i already have about 40-50 gig of data on the drive and to put it all back would be a strain...

oh well....

thank you so much though
 
oh please...
you did more that i initially dared hoping for and you were fast with your responses..

thanks again
 
i think i see part of the problem...

the original format of the volume is fast32...
when i click on erase...it does some erase but still labels it fat32 under the info tab...

seems wrong somehow!
 
I think the problem is that since you partitioned the drive on your PC, the Mac isn't seeing the partition table. I don't know how to get around this short of taking everything off and starting from scratch 🙁
 
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