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GodsHand

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 3, 2006
17
0
Okay so I have an odd problem.

My external 250GB drive is FAT32 formatted. Problem is, OSX 10.4.7 does not want to search the drive. Saved Searches do not find "Kind / Others... / Adobe Photoshop file" for instance. Spotlight doesn't search the drive.

I'm guessing it's because it's not Mac OS Journaled (HFS+ I believe). Is there any way to convert my FAT32 drive to HFS+ without losing data?

Would this work? Boot into Windows, use PartitionMagic 8 to create two FAT32 partitions. So I have all my files on one FAT32 partition. Then go into OSX and use Disk Utility to convert the other FAT32 partition to HFS+ or is there other software that does that? Then once that partition is HFS+, I would copy all the FAT32 files over, delete the FAT32 partition and resize the HFS+.

Is this possible?
 

iMeowbot

macrumors G3
Aug 30, 2003
8,634
0
Macdrive (for Windows) doesn't know how to add an HFS partition to a PC-formatted disk.

iPartition (for Mac) doesn't know how to resize FAT partitions. Maybe you could do the Partition Magic thing first and then try to convert the new empty FAT partition using iPartition, but I wouldn't count on it.

All of these repartitioning programs warn you to backup your data anyway. You really must do that if you care at all about your files, even if a repartitioning program could handle all the desired formats, there are many opportunities for the process to go wrong. So do that, put the files onto CD, DVD, tape, a separate drive, an iPod, whatever you have. Better, do two backups. Then you don't need to care if repartitioning wipes the data.
 
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