Time Machine Drive Partitioning Issues

[joesenior91]

Hi there,

so i've got a unibody MBP, and connected to this i have a 320gb external drive i use to back up, but i only back up music, movies and documents so it's got 50 free gigabytes. i was hoping to partition off say 30gigs, install tinyxp and play games off this partition. but when i try and partition off 30, 25 or even 20 gigs Disk Utility tells me there's no free space on the hard drive.

so my questions are, how can i solve this issues, and would this idea work for playing games through windows anyway? i initially tried to get a bootcamp partition on my main Macintosh HD, but apparently there are files that cannot be moved in the way, and the only way to solve said issue is a complete reinstall of leopard, which i can't be bothered with seeing as snow leopards only a couple of months away.


Cheers, Joe

 

[upinflames900]

You cannot partition either drive because you have files that would need to be moved. When you save files to a hard drive, edit them, etc the hard drive is not filled up from slot 1 to slot 100 (to make it very simple) leaving slots 101 to 150 open. It may fill 1 to 10 and then skip 11 and 12 and then fill 13 to 20. Basically you cannot partition the drive because in both cases you do not have a sequential string of open spaces that would be 20GB. The only way to solve this is to take everything off of your external hard drive and then paste it all back on to it. Doing it that way would in essence defrag your hard drive so that you can then partition it.