Partitioning a Hard Drive for Time Machine

[Victor2112]

I have an external 500 GB hard drive with data that I would like to partition so I can use Time Machine. Is there a way to partition the hard drive without having to move the current data off the drive? I saw Disc Utilities had a partition area but was afraid this would wipe off the data while creating the new partition.

OS: Leopard

 

[chscag]

I have an external 500 GB hard drive with data that I would like to partition so I can use Time Machine. Is there a way to partition the hard drive without having to move the current data off the drive? I saw Disc Utilities had a partition area but was afraid this would wipe off the data while creating the new partition.

OS: Leopard

No, not without moving the data first. In order to use Time Machine the drive will have to be formatted to HFS+ on whatever partition you create for backups. You can certainly partition that drive into several partitions but there is no way to retain the data as partitioning will destroy it. If the drive were to be used on a Win machine there are utilities which can re-partition without destroying data. (Partition Magic, etc.)

Regards.