Formatting Ext. HDD - Can I partition?

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I have an ext. hdd that I was using for my PC some years ago that I recently dug back out. It was formatted NTFS. So after doing some reading on this topic, I know I can on read from this hdd and I'll have to reformat it to be able to read/write.

So using the Disk Utility I guess I'm suppose to reformatted as Mac OS Extended (journaled) because it's most common. Can I partition the drive and reformatted only a portion of it?

 

[MacUser2525]

I have an ext. hdd that I was using for my PC some years ago that I recently dug back out. It was formatted NTFS. So after doing some reading on this topic, I know I can on read from this hdd and I'll have to reformat it to be able to read/write.

So using the Disk Utility I guess I'm suppose to reformatted as Mac OS Extended (journaled) because it's most common. Can I partition the drive and reformatted only a portion of it?

Yes when in diskutil instead of selecting the partition that is already there select the drive itself then the option to partition is available on the right. If you want to do it with no data loss on the external then you would need a windows machine with something like Partition Magic or if you had a Linux machine then you can use parted, gparted or qtparted to do the same.

 

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Thanks! 🙂

 

[sickmacdoc]

And also when you are repartitioning it in Disk Utility, make sure you change the partition map using the Options key at the bottom in addition to setting the "Format type" to Mac OS Extended (Journaled)-- use GUID for an Intel based Mac or Apple Partition Map for a PowerPC based Mac as your drive will probably have MBR (Master Boot Record- a PC partition map) as it stands now.