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Powerful Partition Management Tools?

crjackson2134

crjackson2134

macrumors 601
Original poster
Mar 6, 2013
4,848
1,958
Charlotte, NC
I'm looking for opinions on Mac Partition Management Tools.

I recently had an issue and found that DiskUtility was not able to handle my needs (at least the GUI interface couldn't). I'm sure I probably could have satisfactorily accomplished my objective using terminal commands, but I'm only a minimal user of the terminal, and not particularly proficient.

I resorted to booting a Live Linux-CD and using gParted, which met my needs perfectly.

I'm looking for a similarly powerful tool that is native to macOS so that I don't have to resort to booting a Live-CD for partition work.

Suggestions?
 
crjackson2134 said:
I'm looking for opinions on Mac Partition Management Tools.

I recently had an issue and found that DiskUtility was not able to handle my needs (at least the GUI interface couldn't). I'm sure I probably could have satisfactorily accomplished my objective using terminal commands, but I'm only a minimal user of the terminal, and not particularly proficient.

I resorted to booting a Live Linux-CD and using gParted, which met my needs perfectly.

I'm looking for a similarly powerful tool that is native to macOS so that I don't have to resort to booting a Live-CD for partition work.

Suggestions?
Click to expand...

Honestly, if it's important, and Disk Utility can't do it, read diskutil's man page. Best tool out there, and it's free.
 
crjackson2134 said:
I resorted to booting a Live Linux-CD and using gParted, which met my needs perfectly.
Click to expand...
If you have something that meets your needs perfectly, why look further?

gParted is really, really good. Plus, if you're going to modify partitions on the system drive it's more than likely that you'll need to boot from another drive - which the live-CD does.

I use live CDs (and "Hiren's BootCD") for almost all of my partition management tasks.
 
Perhaps GPT fdisk (also called gdisk). I've used it to manually recreate a disk (including the EFI and recovery partitions).
 
cdf said:
Perhaps GPT fdisk (also called gdisk). I've used it to manually recreate a disk (including the EFI and recovery partitions).
Click to expand...

I’ll have a look at that. Specifically I want something the shows ALL partitions on the disk. My issue was caused by a hidden EFI / Recovery (hfs+) on a FAT drive.

I’ll google it and look into this. I looked at iPartition and it’s no longer supported.

Read the page on GPT. Looks good and I’ll probably give it a whirl, however I was hoping to find something with a graphical interface that will run directly on macOS. I’m not looking to manage my macOS boot drive (while booted to it). I want to manage other connected drives.
 
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gparted is pretty powerful and I really don't think you want to make partition changes on the level that gparted lets you booted from the drive.
 
devon807 said:
ParagonNTFS works pretty good
Click to expand...

AFAIK, Paragon NTFS is a unified file system driver, not a partition manager. Thanks for the reply.
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haralds said:
That used to be my GoTo. But it's been discontinued and does not support the new schemes.
Command line is the only way to go for now.
Click to expand...

That’s what I was afraid of. I guess I’ll have to stick with Linux toolsets then.
Such a shame as macOS is the brother of Linux.

I used to enjoy learning command line tools under Linux many years ago, but I remember very little of that now and would prefer a powerful GUI... I need the crutches;)
 
devon807 said:
Hard Disk Manager by Paragon, sorry. Long day lol. NOT NTFS ;)
Click to expand...

This looks VERY promising. Thank you...

They have a 10 day free trial that I’ll be taking advantage of, and likely purchase.

The only feature I didn’t see, is UUID modification, but it’s not likely I’ll need that. I can still boot GParted on the rare occasion if called for, but I can’t think of a scenario for that off hand.
 
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Stellar Partition Manager sounded promising but gives and error "not optimized for this Mac" was disappointing.

Then in use, it keeps crashing/closing. To iffy to trust for needed drives...

That said,

Hard Disk Manager by Paragon, is actually very powerful and I've already used to to cleanup 5 drives with great results.

Hats off to Paragon for this... I'll be purchasing this one. The hunt is finished!

Thanks to all of you for your help. Very much appreciated.
 
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I've been using Paragon Hard Disk Manager (for Mac) for over a year now, and it is excellent. It allows deep partition management, copying and repair. I have repaired and backed up my Win10 partition without issue, something I wasn't able to do with any other Mac app.
 
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Yes, I’m impressed, it’s a keeper. It even handles APFS partitions with ease. Linux based apps can’t even do that yet. So far I have nothing but high praise. It can even manage a boot drive with SIP enabled.
 
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