09-05-2009, 03:50 PM

good day all, would anyone know if it is possible to un-partition my main drive

I'm working with finalcutpro and my main drive is only 40gig so I have a partition of 19gig for my scratch disk and I'm left with just 9gig on the operating system side after app's installed, as my projects get larger i find my G4 10.3.9 wants to stop for tea,
I would like to un-partition and use another large drive as my scratch disk freeing up the main drive in the hope it wont feel over crowded,

would removing the partition wipe the drive completely leaving it unable to install the OS.

I do have another G4 startup drive 30gig without a partition, would one assist the other in this delicate operation,

any help would be marvelous,

thank you indeed. blodwyn

09-05-2009, 07:02 PM

Yes it will stop for tea and supper with such tiny spare space available. To work anywhere near maximum performance you need 15-20% free hard drive space. Using Disk Utility to remove the partition will format the drive.

You can remove a partition without wiping the drive but it is very complicated using Terminal. I think your go would be to bite the bullet and pop a new drive in, remembering up to 2002 Quicksilver can only see a maximum of 128GBS, so if it is earlier a 120GB HDD would make a huge difference. As you are finding out those old 40 and 30GB HDD are just not big enough to run OS X and applications.

If you want to see what Terminal involves here is a link:-

macosxhints.com - Modify partitions without wiping the entire disk

And Blodwyn with a new, bigger faster HDD maintained with MainMenu or Onyx, you could install Tiger OS X.4 which is much faster than Panther.

09-05-2009, 09:59 PM

Disk Utility can do it. I have never partitioned and/or unpartitioned a hard drive, as I am just fine with virtual machines, so this is just a theory. Go into Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/) and go to the top disk. Not the "Macintosh HD", but the drive the Macintosh HD is on. You can just delete the partition that you don't want, or erase and set its size to 0 GB. Then set your Macintosh HD's size to almost the size of the entire drive. For example, my Hitachi HDD is 250.06GB, but my Macintosh HD volume is only 249.58GB.

Hope that helps.

09-06-2009, 08:56 AM

thank you for your reply,
my mac is g4blue with dual 533MHz powerpc 1.25gigram,
I would like to up-grade to tiger, may I ask is it possable to install the OS on a 125gig drive, and then [remove the old drive]? is there a regestry like the microsoft pc's,

also if I remove the partition with disk utility would that wipe the regestry??, I would like to re-instaling the OS. but am worried that if I do un-partition I will end up with a blank drive, or is formating the drive the regestry(footprint),

sorry to be un savy,

Ok,to re-cap, I do intend to upgrade to 10.4 tiger, I need to install the OS on a large drive I have a 125gighdd, I understand that, the speed of the drive I dont know, what would be exceptable and where do I look to find the speed, ,

I will archive all my files and try the un-partition with disk utility first,

Thank you again for your help
Blodwyn.

09-06-2009, 09:03 AM

If you delete a partition or format a partition, yes, you will delete everything on that partition.

registry??? - don't understand this as there is no registry in any OS except Windows

09-06-2009, 09:18 AM

good day bobtomay,
So if I delete the patition on the main drive I can then simply re-install the OSX with out a hitch,

Would his mean I can install OS X to any drive I choose and then remove the original drive, If so, how civilized these mac's are..

thank you very much.