Will Resizing Partitions Erase Data?

[T3hPreacher]

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.

 

[GGJstudios]

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.

 

[T3hPreacher]

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?

 

[T3hPreacher]

Nevermind, I got it sorted. Thanks for your help.