Possible to Reformat Harddrive with stuff on it ?

[fab5freddy]

I have a 1 TB Drive, that is formatted in Mac OS Journaled,
and has 300 GB of files on it already.
I have to reformat it to NTFS format.

Is there anyway i can reformat the Harddrive to NTFS format
with the stuff on there with 10.5.6 Leopard ?

Maybe i could Re-Partition the 1TB drive with the stuff on it,
and dump it on to the One Partition and reformat the other Partition ??

thanks!

 

[RITZFit]

yeah, I don't think you'll be able to go from OS Journaled to NTFS (you can for FAT32 to NTFS tho) w/ out loosing info. like you said, your best option would prob to be create a small partition on the drive and dump all your data into that so you can do whatever you need to the the rest. good luck

 

[fab5freddy]

So could i do all this on the One Drive? Could i Reformat
just 1 partition without touching the other partitions ?

thanks!

 

[emt1]

Resizing or creating partitions without the destruction of data requires software other than disk utility. If you use DU then you will lose data.

 

[melchior]

it is possible, but not using the built in software. you'd want to use something like iPartition to resize the large partition, create a new partition with free space and then you can format it to NTFS, but again, not with OS X. there is a terminal command

diskutil resizeVolume

but if you're asking here, i'd suggest using iPartition or similar.

 

[fab5freddy]

Melchior, That's pretty impressive.
You've been a MacRumors member since 2002.

I didn't even know they existed then!
I wonder when MacRumors started ?

 

[MacManiac76]

Melchior, That's pretty impressive.
You've been a MacRumors member since 2002.

I didn't even know they existed then!
I wonder when MacRumors started ?

Seems MacRumors has been around since February 2000, although I'm not sure if the forums/membership has been around since the beginning.

 

[melchior]

Seems MacRumors has been around since February 2000, although I'm not sure if the forums/membership has been around since the beginning.

a bit off topic, but yeah, the forums appeared sometime in 2001 and i lurked for about a year before i had anything worth saying. heady days when rumours were really rumours...

 

[gr8tfly]

it is possible, but not using the built in software. you'd want to use something like iPartition to resize the large partition, create a new partition with free space and then you can format it to NTFS, but again, not with OS X. there is a terminal command

diskutil resizeVolume

but if you're asking here, i'd suggest using iPartition or similar.

Disk Utility in Leopard can add/remove/resize partitions on-the-fly. It won't create a new partition, though, if there are files residing on that part of the volume. Something like iPartition would be needed, in that case.

But, (OP) you can't do the whole drive, and you can't format a partition as NTFS (only FAT32). You could move the data to a FAT32 partition, then convert it while in Windows. (I believe iPartition can format in NTFS). Another hitch is you can't write to a NTFS partition natively in OS-X.