Changing partition type on external firewire HD?

[Joony]

Greetings all,

I've been using my WD My Book 400gb for quite a bit now, and I never changed the partition type over to journaled from FAT32. The 4gig file limit is starting to annoy me. (I regret not changing it over in the first place 🙁)

The problem is that I already have about a hundred gigs worth of data that I can't move off at the moment.

Can Disk Utlity handle partitioning off the existing free space into a different type? It doesen't seem so after looking at it.

I know that it can be done in Windows using Partition Magic...

Also, I read that there might be a increase in throughput using journaled instead of FAT32, is this true?

 

[aspro]

I don't believe that Disk Utility can do any non-destructive resizing. There are a couple of Linux live cds out there that can do what you are after, such as GPartition.

 

[Eidorian]

Are you sure its FAT32? I was under the impression that FAT32 was limited to partitions of 32GB?

And I don't believe that Disk Utility can do any non-destructive resizing. There are a couple of Linux live cds out there that can do what you are after.

OS X can format drives to FAT32's maximum partition size limitation. (4 TB - some change)

I personally don't know of any live partition software for OS X. Changing partition type instead of splitting seems like a bad idea to begin with.