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How do I partition my disk
- Thread starter chrislee8
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Use at your OWN risk (or that of your data's risk): AKA Where the Jebus are my files?
There is no decent way to do it for free.
You could attempt to use pdisk to do it, but unless you're conversant in UNIX and love reading man pages, it might be a touch nut to crack.
There are a few products out there (for $$$) that will resize your partitions or partition an unpartitioned disk. But there are many articles on many forums and Mac support sites that detail problems with both. IMO, there are no 3rd party repartitioning apps that can do the job SAFELY.
But if you must:
iPartition
VolumeWorks
PartitionToolkit
Again, if you want to do this that badly, make sure you have an excellent back up first. And if you do get an excellent back up, why not just use Disk Utility to erase and repartition your disk and then clone everything back from your back up? It's safer & proven effective.
There is no decent way to do it for free.
You could attempt to use pdisk to do it, but unless you're conversant in UNIX and love reading man pages, it might be a touch nut to crack.
There are a few products out there (for $$$) that will resize your partitions or partition an unpartitioned disk. But there are many articles on many forums and Mac support sites that detail problems with both. IMO, there are no 3rd party repartitioning apps that can do the job SAFELY.
But if you must:
iPartition
VolumeWorks
PartitionToolkit
Again, if you want to do this that badly, make sure you have an excellent back up first. And if you do get an excellent back up, why not just use Disk Utility to erase and repartition your disk and then clone everything back from your back up? It's safer & proven effective.
chrislee8 said:the list of mac better than ms is getting shorter and shorter for me.
I don't think this should really make it on your list. This is usually more problems with poor initial planning then with it being a Mac or a WinTelThon. Plus, disk is cheap, so why not have a new disk rather then a partition? And finally HFS+ is a pretty complicated disk format, one that was not built for repartitioning on the fly. FAT & NTFS, on the other hand are fairly simple in comparison. They are much more amenable to repartitioning. Heck, it wasn't until the last 4 years that you could even install the Windows OS on anything larger then a 4GB partition!! It BEGS for repartitioning!
my purporse of having another partition is installing another Linux onto it.
i don't think external HD is a good idea for that.
the topic is off.
I want some free partition tool to partition my hard drive without erasing my HD.
i don't think external HD is a good idea for that.
the topic is off.
I want some free partition tool to partition my hard drive without erasing my HD.
Trying to resize with pdisk is a really bad idea.
You can't use pdisk for this, despite a comment on Mac OS X Hints about using pdisk to change the partition map and then using a disk repair utility to attempt to clear-up the resulting mess. Aside from the fact that that approach won't properly resize the data structures on the disk, you also run the risk of destroying any files near the end of your volume. Not good.
We think "many" is an exaggeration, certainly in the case of our product (iPartition). As far as we know, there are only a few such reports on the 'Net for iPartition, all relating to problems with version 1.02 and earlier that have since been fixed.
Also, using our software is safe, as long as you back-up anything you need to keep first. The worst that could happen is that you end-up reformatting a volume and restoring from the back-up (which is exactly the alternative that you propose). We're confident that won't happen with version 1.06 of iPartition though, barring things outside our control (power failures and the like).
As for doing this sort of thing for free, well... if you find a way and it works for you, then good luck with it.
yellow said:
You can't use pdisk for this, despite a comment on Mac OS X Hints about using pdisk to change the partition map and then using a disk repair utility to attempt to clear-up the resulting mess. Aside from the fact that that approach won't properly resize the data structures on the disk, you also run the risk of destroying any files near the end of your volume. Not good.
yellow said:
We think "many" is an exaggeration, certainly in the case of our product (iPartition). As far as we know, there are only a few such reports on the 'Net for iPartition, all relating to problems with version 1.02 and earlier that have since been fixed.
Also, using our software is safe, as long as you back-up anything you need to keep first. The worst that could happen is that you end-up reformatting a volume and restoring from the back-up (which is exactly the alternative that you propose). We're confident that won't happen with version 1.06 of iPartition though, barring things outside our control (power failures and the like).
chrislee8 said:
As for doing this sort of thing for free, well... if you find a way and it works for you, then good luck with it.
There is a free partition tool built into Disk Utility. First backup your entire system, you are backing up regularly right (THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP), use Panther's Disk Utiliy for this as well and back up the image to iPod, Firewire HDD, or DVDs (for files-if you have a burner).
Next boot from the Restore/Install DVD and go into Disk Utility and partition your internal drive. Then boot from the external drive and restore the image, all your settings etc. will be exactly the same.
(THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP), use Panther's Disk Utiliy for this as well and back up the image to iPod, Firewire HDD, or DVDs (for files-if you have a burner). Next boot from the Restore/Install DVD and go into Disk Utility and partition your internal drive. Then boot from the external drive and restore the image, all your settings etc. will be exactly the same.