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ratboy90

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 15, 2009
321
7
Can someone please tell me the difference between the option erase and partition in Disk Utility?
 
Erase
The next pane, Erase, does exactly what you would think it should: It erases drives and partitions. This is essentially a quick-and-dirty partitioning and initialization tool; it creates a single empty partition on the selected device and erases anything that was previously there. Figure 3.58 shows the Erase pane.


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further reading: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=169576&seqNum=10


Partition
To create a more complex drive layout, use the Partition pane. Shown in Figure 3.59, this is the control center for working with your drive. Be warned—changes here will erase any information on the target drive!

The Volume Scheme section of the Partition pane contains a visual representation of the partitions on the system. Each box is a partition. The highlighted box is the active partition.

You can change a partition's size by dragging the dividers between the partitions up and down to shrink or grow the available space. As you drag the bar, the size field on the right portion of the pane changes to show the current settings.

Figure 3.59 Partitioning your drive erases any existing information.


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further reading: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=169576&seqNum=10


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Difference: ERASE erases a volume, PARTITION partitions an external HDD into several partitions, this data already on that drive might get deleted..
 
Partition logically organizes your physical drive. This can be done non-destructively (not losing any data) in some instances or destructively (in most circumstances).

erase: removes the files/directories on the partition. It leaves the logically defined drive structure alone, just removing the data.
 
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