06-03-2011, 09:04 AM

I want to make a small portion of an external hard drive fat 32 to make it writeable in mac os. I don't want to install any ntfs writing software or anything, just want to go with this simpler though not ideal solution.

Disk utility shows a single partition scheme called 'new volume' in the drop down list under volume scheme when set to current. I can't resize this or edit the volume information or anything at all. It is NTFS formatted, does this make a difference for my ability to change the partition size? I want to avoid losing the data on the drive and so hoped to non destructively set aside a portion of the unused space for fat 32 but maintain the data already there. Is this doable?

06-03-2011, 09:57 AM

Originally Posted by MACoroni

I want to make a small portion of an external hard drive fat 32 to make it writeable in mac os. I don't want to install any ntfs writing software or anything, just want to go with this simpler though not ideal solution.

Disk utility shows a single partition scheme called 'new volume' in the drop down list under volume scheme when set to current. I can't resize this or edit the volume information or anything at all. It is NTFS formatted, does this make a difference for my ability to change the partition size? I want to avoid losing the data on the drive and so hoped to non destructively set aside a portion of the unused space for fat 32 but maintain the data already there. Is this doable?

Best bet is to use iPartition. Although you should be aware that no re-partitioning software is utterly foolproof. It's always wise to maintain a backup of important files just in case. Heck, that drive could itself go belly-up in the course of normal operation, and then you'd lose it all that way too.

06-03-2011, 10:13 AM

Thanks, I'll give that a shot in the future, is it free software? What does it do that disk utility doesn't?
On this occasion, in the end I just erased the whole things and went for 2 partitions of MacOS Journaled and Fat32. I wanted to do this as a favour for somebody, while I could have backed up the contents to the machine I was reading the drive from before performing the operation it would have taken time because of how much data was there and he said he was willing to part with that data anyway. But it is in an interesting limitation of the disk utility application. Is this happening because it was ntfs or is it something else? Whilst trying to find solutions on google to this specific problem they all gave instructions for lowering the size of the existing partition by dragging it in the diagram. But for me, this was locked and immovable.

I'll look in to iPartition when I get the chance some time though. Thank you.

06-03-2011, 10:59 AM

Originally Posted by MACoroni

Thanks, I'll give that a shot in the future, is it free software? What does it do that disk utility doesn't?
On this occasion, in the end I just erased the whole things and went for 2 partitions of MacOS Journaled and Fat32. I wanted to do this as a favour for somebody, while I could have backed up the contents to the machine I was reading the drive from before performing the operation it would have taken time because of how much data was there and he said he was willing to part with that data anyway. But it is in an interesting limitation of the disk utility application. Is this happening because it was ntfs or is it something else? Whilst trying to find solutions on google to this specific problem they all gave instructions for lowering the size of the existing partition by dragging it in the diagram. But for me, this was locked and immovable.

I'll look in to iPartition when I get the chance some time though. Thank you.

It's not free, and what it will do that Disk Utility can't is non-destructively resize any partition. DU can only do that with HFS+ partitions. And maybe NTFS *if* you have an NTFS read/write driver installed, like Tuxera's driver.

EDIT: actually now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure even with an NTFS driver, DU can't do it. It seems I tried a few weeks ago.