Question about Disc Utility

Well I took the plunge and traded off my desktop PC for a Core Duo mac mini. I successfully upgraded to Leopard and starting to get the hang of it. So far I'm pretty happy I don't have a PC in this house anymore. And I have been to this forum many times to solve something I couldn't figure out how to do. Excellent forum. Especially the switcher's hangout. So to the root of my question. I used Disc Utility to split up my hard drive into a 50GB and 30GB partition. I then clicked on Apply. But the thing is, is that the little bar has been going and it says modifying partition map for about 45 minutes now. That doesn't seem to be doing anything really. Is this typical for a Mac to take this long to repartition the hard drive? Thanks for the help

you did this to your boot drive?

i'm not sure it can partition while the disk is "live" - that is while the OS is running on the drive. i would assume it may destroy all the data on the drive as well. did it give you any warning or error? does it give you the opportunity to stop? it could be waiting for a restart too, so it can actually do the repartition (sort of like a C: drive disk check in windows will only start on a reboot).

Yes my boot drive. No warning or anything that I can remember. I was assuming it was going to require a reboot automatically to finish it. I am just afraid interrupting it would cause some bad juju to come around. I don't want to loose my files.

yeah, well, you may lose your files. i'm thinking the partition may be destructive. at least i found that to be true on a FAT32 formatted external drive through disk utility. could be different with HFS+.

can you cancel it?

can i ask why you'd want to partition it anyway?

Well I am typing away on this computer just waiting for it to finish or something. There isn't a cancel button that I can hit. I am partitioning it in case I ever have a reason to reinstall. I can keep the other partition with all my personal files. So I am going to backup all my files on DVD and exit the program and reboot and see what happens.

good idea.

hard drives are pretty cheap though, you may want to consider just getting an inexpensive usb HD and cloning the one in your mac as a backup that you could just swap in in case of failure.

if you get that ext. HD, try Super Duper for backups.