Can I add a partition to a disk without wiping the data on it?

[spiritlevel]

I currently have a 750GB HFS+ disk (system) which has about 300GB of data on it. I want to add 2 partitions to it - ideally without having to copy everything off, wiping it, adding the new partition setup and copying everything back.

I seem to remember there was a utility that did this - or am I imagining it?

Also, the 2 partitions I want to add are PC partitions - so my disk will end up looking something like...

465GB HFS+
200GB NTFS
32GB FAT 32

If I can do this, what is the best way to format these partitions in these PC formats?

And what is the best way of cloning my current PC partitions (on a different disk) and copying them over to the new PC partitions that I will be adding to my system disk?

Thanks

 

[spiritlevel]

Update...

I have used winclone to create clones of my current FAT32 and HTFS volumes.

I have found a utility which can apparently edit partition sizes without losing data - it's called iPartition. Unfortunately there is no 'working' demo version of this software and it costs £30 so I would like to hear what peoples opinions are on it before I commit to buying it. Have you used iPartition? does it do what it says on the tin?

I have also backed up my current 750GB system drive to one of the external 1TB drives using CCC

So I am pretty much ready to go - but the bit I am still confused about is how to format the 2 new PC partitions I will be creating on my system drive as HTFS and FAT32 - will winclone do this automatically when I restore my winclone backups to these partitions?

I could really do with some help here as I feel that if I do something wwrong I could lose some important data.

thanks a lot

 

[MattZani]

I've been fiddling with Partitions in Disk Utility, without Wiping them, now have 4 Partitions.

OS X 10.5 - 200Gb
OS X 10.6 - 13Gb
Windows 7 - 13Gb
Fake DVD - 7Gb

All started from one Partition of 230Gb with 10.5 on.

 

[spiritlevel]

Thanks for that - I didn't realise I could do it with disk utility...doh!

However - it didn't work out well - I tried to shrink my main partition from 750GB to 466GB and add a 32GB fat32 partition and a 200GB HTFS partition - disk utility started the task and ran for a few minutes - then I had a hard crash requiring a restart...

When I restarted, I still had just the one partition on my drive but the data "used" on it had grown from 300GB to nearly 600...

So I ended up wiping the drive, repartitioning it and restoring everything from backup.