Issues adding partitions to an external HDD

[MacBH928]

I have Mavericks on my '08 macbook . I bought a new Toshiba 1TB HDD, and when I researched online I was under the impression that I can add partitions to an HDD without losing any information on the disk.

I opened Disk Utility and Formatted the HDD to 400GB and 600GB partition as Mac OS Extended Journaled . I launched Time Machine and I backed my macbook to the 400GB partition and encrypted it. It worked.

Now I want to add a 3rd partition to the HDD but that does not seem to be possible , as the (+) button in the "Partitions" tab in Disk Utility is not highlighted and is NOT selectable . If I selected the unused 600GB partition , I can only chose to take that partition out but I can not add any more to it.

Can some one help?

 

[Weaselboy]

You can't add a partition because your 400+600 together is using the entire 1TB drive. You need to resize (shrink) the 600GB partition following this guide, then you will have free space to add another, third partition at the end.

I am assuming here the 600GB partition is at the end (second)?

 

[MacBH928]

Thanks for caring to give help.

As you see, the area that says "Untitled" is where I want to add extra partitions but Disk Utility will not allow me to do that. I can not add partitions or resize. Do you think I should format that part into another kind of partition like MS-DOS FAT ExFat ?

 

[Bruno09]

I launched Time Machine and I backed my macbook to the 400GB partition and encrypted it.

Hence you can no longer modify anything via Disk Utility.

See : http://pondini.org/OSX/DU3.html

"Note: Effective with Lion (10.7.x), if a disk contains an encrypted partition, no partitions on that disk can be added, resized, or deleted by Disk Utility.
If you're familiar with UNIX and Terminal, you may be able to do this with the diskutil command."

 

[Weaselboy]

Thanks for caring to give help.

As you see, the area that says "Untitled" is where I want to add extra partitions but Disk Utility will not allow me to do that. I can not add partitions or resize. Do you think I should format that part into another kind of partition like MS-DOS FAT ExFat ?

I think Bruno may be onto something. When I read your comment about encryption, I took it to mean you just checked the box in Time Machine to encrypt the backup. All that would do is put an encrypted sparse bundle on the 400GB partition and it would not impact resizing of partitions. But Bruno's comment is making me wonder if you did something else like encrypt the entire 400GB partition after the TM backup. Can you clarify what you did?

Let's do this... open Terminal and enter "diskutil list" (without the quotes) then post up the output of the command. That will show us what is going on with your partitions.

 

[MacBH928]

I am running Mavericks , When I inserted my HDD for the first time my Time Machine asked if I wanted to use it I said no. I partitioned the drive (400GB, 600GB) , ejected and remounted and when it asked me again I said yes and chose to encrypt the 400GB.

I am not sure what is a sparse bundle is , and there is no encryption ticks in my Time Machine in the Preference Pane , at least where I looked.

So, now to fix this I need to turn encryption OFF on the 400GB part , add partitions, then re-encrypt my backup volume?

I learned there is an "Encryption OFF" in the Disk Utility menus , but I heard it doesn't work right.

Thanks for your help everyone

 

[Weaselboy]

So, now to fix this I need to turn encryption OFF on the 400GB part , add partitions, then re-encrypt my backup volume?

I learned there is an "Encryption OFF" in the Disk Utility menus , but I heard it doesn't work right.

Yes, Bruno correctly identified the problem. Just turn off encryption in Disk Util and you can then change your partitions.

I would not turn disk encryption back on in Disk Util. If you use the built in Time Machine backup encryption it will be easier to run backups and will not cause this issue. After you turn off the Disk Util encryption, go into Time Machine preferences and click the select disk button and in that pane check the box to encrypt the TM backup.

 

[MacBH928]

ok thanks this helped a lot.

I think I will just reformat that HDD into as many partitions as I want then , re-backup and re-encrypt. Last time it took something like 6hrs for 220GB or so, I hope this does not take a toll on the HDD.