formatting external hard drive

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I have a external HD 250gb. its currently formatted to NTFS. Can i partition half to fat 32 yet not lose NTFS data on the HD?
 
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Assuming the data takes up less than half the available space then yes.

However...... I don't know of any mac tools to do this on-the-fly for NTFS/FAT32 disks(others may). OSX can do this for HFS+ drives. If you have access to a windows machine then there are a few tools that can do this. Partition Magic is the best IMHO.

Another way is to copy the data somewhere else. Re-partition and format the drive, then copy the data back.

I obviously don't know why you want to regress part of your disk to fat32 but if it's just so you can read/write to it from mac then you may wish to consider Paragon(commercial) or MacFUSE/NTFS-3G (free) as a way of allowing NTFS writes within mac.

HTH
mrplow
 

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