diskutility crisis, pls help!

[G0meZ]

in diskutil, I wanted to add another partition to an external fw-hdd, when pressing apply-btn, the tool just never finishes creating the partition, progress bar stays around middle, hdd is working like mad, since over 30mins now!
it says 'shrinking the disk' next to the progress bar...

what do I do? does aborting DU risk corruption of existing partitions?
ayyy! very bad scene since no recent backup available!

 

[iWind130290]

in diskutil, I wanted to add another partition to an external fw-hdd, when pressing apply-btn, the tool just never finishes creating the partition, progress bar stays around middle, hdd is working like mad, since over 30mins now!
it says 'shrinking the disk' next to the progress bar...

what do I do? does aborting DU risk corruption of existing partitions?
ayyy! very bad scene since no recent backup available!

Make sure that you're createing a new one from a "Mac OS Extended" formatted partition.

For more carefully situation, verify the volume that you want to split and repair it (if necessary)

 

[G0meZ]

i'll do that next time
meanwhile, it has successfully completed....took over 45mins...boy was I worried...will backup my backup today!

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

When you are adding a partition to your HDD, the utility you're using has to physically move files out of the way to create it. If you have a lot of data, then it takes a long time. And, regardless, you should ALWAYS back up before adjusting partitions on a HDD. If the partition table gets corrupted, everything is gone. You might be able to recover it, but better safe than sorry.

 

[G0meZ]

thanks for clarifying
makes sense.
i guess so far i never added a partition to a fairly full disk...so when it took so long i figured the utility had descended into infinite loop madness...