Partitioning a Hard Drive

[mrmacdude]

I want to partition my external hard drive.

As far as I can tell, I should be able to have a 32gb partition of it that is usable on both Macs and PCs, and the rest compatible with only mac. how do i partition it thusly?

 

[nownot]

either gparted or ipartiton. well let me take that back if drive is hfs+ you have to use ipartition if it is something other than hfs+ you have the option of those two with gprated being the free one.

 

[gr8tfly]

Disk Utility will partition the drive for Mac (HFS+) and/or PC (FAT). However, it will erase the contents when doing so. iPartition can do it on-the-fly.

 

[yellow]

You are not limited to a 32GB FAT32 drive.
With OS X, you can make it as large as you want.

If it's an external, just use Disk Utility.

 

[nownot]

if you use disk utility youll loose all of your data. ipartitoin and gparted will not destroy your data. imo disk utility is pretty bad at parititioning stuff, wish it does what iparition does.

 

[yellow]

That's a bit disingenous.

Disk Utility does an excellent job at partitioning, it just doesn't allow you to do danger things like messing with the partition map on the fly.

So, yes, any data will have to be removed.

But the OP never said there was any data on the external.

 

[nownot]

Disk Utility does an excellent job at partitioning, it just doesn't allow you to do danger things like messing with the partition map on the fly.

so either delete your data loose for sure, or do another option and have a 95% chance of not messing up your data ........ i see no comparison. either way we both should agree there should be a back up somewhere. but ipartition > disk utility when it comes to partitioning.

 

[yellow]

Still disingenous...

Disk Utility does an excellent job at partitioning. 100% functional everytime.
However, one must remove all the data ahead of time. Perhaps it's not as flexible as ipartition, but please don't Disk Utility is "bad at partitioning", as someone might read that and think that it's not able to partition a disk.

 

[nownot]

yes i agree does a great job of doing what it is advertised to do. but if there is a better option why not try that one? but no argument here, it does partition great.

 

[Krevnik]

yes i agree does a great job of doing what it is advertised to do. but if there is a better option why not try that one? but no argument here, it does partition great.

Because those of us who live and die by our data (IT professionals, artists, programmers, etc) know that risk of any kind to our data is BAD.

If we have a 5% chance to fudge up a partition because of something like iPartition, we skip it. We will back up the data on the drive, wipe and and copy back over. Hell, you can even make compressed disk images of your data before wiping to save space.

I run over 1TB of data (my iTunes library, code, etc) on a RAID5 which you think is pretty safe, right? Nope, I nearly lost it all a couple weeks ago when the FS corrupted (RAID was fine). If you care about your data, once you are bitten, you learn to take the safe road REAL quick.

 

[nownot]

either way we both should agree there should be a back up somewhere.

that was my post a few post ago. i agree with you if you have any chance of screwing up your data its not good. but i still see no point in disk utility over ipartition. but i agree you should be a back up.

 

[Krevnik]

that was my post a few post ago. i agree with you if you have any chance of screwing up your data its not good. but i still see no point in disk utility over ipartition. but i agree you should be a back up.

If you make a backup, what is the point of iPartition over Disk Utility? One of the big problems with dynamic resizing of partitions is that the data you lose due to a bug in the app may not be noticed immediately, and may be files used by the FS rather than your data (this is actually what screwed me recently, an HFS+ journal corrupting to the point where the HFS+ tools couldn't even figure out how to get the drive into a good state anymore).

If you are gonna make a backup, partitioning clean is safer and only slower because you then restore onto the clean partition.