Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

T3hPreacher

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 7, 2008
61
1
Hello,

I have a 700 GB external HD with a 349 GB MacOSX Extended (Journaled) partition, and a 349 GB FAT32 Partition.

I need to shrink the FAT32 partition to make room for another smallish HFS+ partition so that I can back up my virtual machine (around 30 GB). My question is whether resizing the FAT32 partition in Disk Utility will harm the data in either of my existing partitions. I understand Leopard to have an on-the-fly partitioning ability, but I wasn't sure whether this applied only to certain file systems.

I am running OSX 10.5.8.

Thanks.
 
If you want to increase the size of a partition, it can be done without erasing data. Decreasing it will most likely erase some or all the data. It's a good idea to back up before re-partitioning. For more information, click Help in Disk Utility. It will tell you the conditions where partitions can be resized without damaging data.
 
Thanks for the tip. I plan to back up my data from that drive now. If I moved that data from the FAT32 into my Time Machine partition, would it mess with Time Machine any?
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.