Help, partition external hard drive

Disk Utility can do it. I'm running Tiger so I apologize for that.

 

There's really no reason to partition your external HD. All of your time machine backups are kept in a folder on the HD called backups.backdup or something similar.

Then you have the whole HD to store whatever you need to and Time Machine won't erase those files - It will simply just start to erase your oldest backups

 

It depends on your needs.

I understand Time Machine deletes when the drive fills up, but once the drive fills up you won't have room, in case you need it for something.

Having partitions ensures that there's always extra room.

I split a 250 GB drive into 3 partitions.

1 for PowerBook Time Machine
1 for iBook Time Machine
1 for Video Projects

If I remember correctly:

-Go into Disk Utility > Partitions
-Change the Volume Scheme from current to # of partitions
-Click and Drag to resize partitions
-Click Option to make sure each partition is set up for Intel Macs, PPC Macs or windows.

 

I just got a 1TB ext. HD for my MacBook Pro today, and this really helped me out and I just wanted to say thanks.

 

cheers!

just joined as this is the 2nd or 3rd time i've found really useful advice through macrumors. thanks for the help!

 

I just ordered the WD 1TB HD. how exactly are you going to go about your backups? Time Machine?

 

This helped a lot. I have a question though. I have some stuff already on my HDD and if i partition my HDD (because i want part of it for time machine and part to work with windows and mac) will it erase my HDD?

 

Yes. Anytime you create a new or change a partition it will erase anything on all partitions on that hard rive.

 

Thanks

Thanks for the help. Just got my 2 TB hard drive and didn't want to use it all for my 750 GB laptop hard drive.

 

Hi Guys, this sounds stupid but i want to ask haha,
So if i create a partition on my external HD (2tb) with data on it , then ill loose all that data eve n if it fits on the first partition (630g or so)?

thanks heaps.