Partitioning a hard drive

[Blackened Apple]

Hey everyone,

I have an external 1 TB hard drive, half of which is filled up with a FAT-formatted partition and the other half is unallocated space. I wanted to create an HFS+ partition on that unallocated half, but I can't seem to do it using Disk Utility. The '+' that should be available is grayed out. How can I do this?

EDIT: BTW, this is because I'm trying to back up the main HDD of a friend's Mac, and I'm uncertain if there would be any sort of filesystem incompatibilities (FAT doesn't support UNIX permissions, etc.).

 

[case2001]

I believe you are running into a permissions issue. I have terabyte drive on my network used as a music, video and picture storage space. When I bought my MacBook Air I could read from the drive but I could not write to the drive. I simply used the chmod command to make it allow me to not read, write and execute. The chmod command is 777 you can look up the command. To verify this you could try copying a file the fat portion of the drive.

Good luck.