Resizing Time Machine partition to fill external HDD

[Hermolicious84]

Hello,

I have a 320 GB Western Digital drive connected to my Macbook Pro 5,1. I have 2 partitions on the WD drive, my Time Machine partition and a FAT32 partition of about 32GB. My Time machine partition is getting pretty close to being full, and although I know that Time Machine will just delete older backups if its partition is full, I don't really have a need for the FAT32 partition anymore.

In Disk Utility, by selecting the external drive and choosing the 'Partition' tab, I am able to erase the FAT32 partition and leave a free space on the drive, but I can't find a way to expand the Time Machine partition to use this space. The TM partition has a slider, but it can only decrease the size of the partition, not expand it.

The free area on the disk shows up in the partition map as a greyed-out area above the TM partition. Any ideas? Is it possible to extend the TM partition to the rest of the disk?

Thanks for your help! This is my first Mac and I haven't used Disk Utility much.

 

[BlueRevolution]

Using Disk Utility you can resize partitions but not move them. In other words, when you create a new partition, the beginning of the partition is fixed and cannot be moved without deleting it.

If you don't mind deleting and remaking the backup, I'd suggest formatting the entire drive.

 

[uaecasher]

Hello,

I have a 320 GB Western Digital drive connected to my Macbook Pro 5,1. I have 2 partitions on the WD drive, my Time Machine partition and a FAT32 partition of about 32GB. My Time machine partition is getting pretty close to being full, and although I know that Time Machine will just delete older backups if its partition is full, I don't really have a need for the FAT32 partition anymore.

In Disk Utility, by selecting the external drive and choosing the 'Partition' tab, I am able to erase the FAT32 partition and leave a free space on the drive, but I can't find a way to expand the Time Machine partition to use this space. The TM partition has a slider, but it can only decrease the size of the partition, not expand it.

The free area on the disk shows up in the partition map as a greyed-out area above the TM partition. Any ideas? Is it possible to extend the TM partition to the rest of the disk?

Thanks for your help! This is my first Mac and I haven't used Disk Utility much.

How can he have two formats in one disk? i.e HSF+ and FAT32

 

[Hermolicious84]

Using Disk Utility you can resize partitions but not move them. In other words, when you create a new partition, the beginning of the partition is fixed and cannot be moved without deleting it.

If you don't mind deleting and remaking the backup, I'd suggest formatting the entire drive.

I decided to go ahead and do this...and If I want in the future, as long as I have my TM backup as the first partition, it looks like it's possible to decrease its size and add a new partition after it. I wish I would have known that when I set it up...

How can he have two formats in one disk? i.e HSF+ and FAT32

With Disk Utility, it doesn't matter how many partitions the disk has or what format they are. Say you want to set up your disk like I had before. You can select "2 partitions" from the drop down menu, size them however you want, and then choose the file system for each.