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- Feb 20, 2012
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Folks-
Sorry for a lame first post. I'm a long-time Apple user trying to get back into the swing of things after five or so years of letting everything pass me by.
I recently bought 10.7 and wanted to make a bootable external HD for troubleshooting purposes. I figured Apple's own Recovery Disk Assistant would be fine.
On its 'about' page, they state:
"The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant will erase all data on the external drive when creating the Recovery HD. You should either backup your data before running the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, or create a new partition on the external drive."
So I went to do this. I admit that I could stand to have a far better command of this stuff.
With my external HD plugged in, I went into Disk Utility, selected the disk, and then selected the 'partition' tab. There was nothing about creating a new partition without deleting my old one. Tragically, I missed the '+' symbol as the step necessary to create a new partition.
But here's the kicker: Disk Utility says "to resize a partition on the selected disk, drag its resize control and click apply. The size of the partition will change, but the partition won't be erased." Stupidly, I resized the window of which a decade of my crucial data was represented as a blue fraction, and clicked apply. One second later, the operation was complete, and my external HD was erased.
Two questions:
(1) why is there language about a partition not being erased when resized if it indeed is?
(2) judging from the single second this disaster took to unfold, DU did not write-over my disk, just deleted the index or some such thing. How screwed am I?
Profusest thanks for any help or input other than that pointing out my folly.
EDIT: apparently "unlike what Disk Utility dangerously implies" would have been a better choice of words.
EDIT 2: anybody know of 'undelete' software that can recover files with their original names?
Sorry for a lame first post. I'm a long-time Apple user trying to get back into the swing of things after five or so years of letting everything pass me by.
I recently bought 10.7 and wanted to make a bootable external HD for troubleshooting purposes. I figured Apple's own Recovery Disk Assistant would be fine.
On its 'about' page, they state:
"The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant will erase all data on the external drive when creating the Recovery HD. You should either backup your data before running the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, or create a new partition on the external drive."
So I went to do this. I admit that I could stand to have a far better command of this stuff.
With my external HD plugged in, I went into Disk Utility, selected the disk, and then selected the 'partition' tab. There was nothing about creating a new partition without deleting my old one. Tragically, I missed the '+' symbol as the step necessary to create a new partition.
But here's the kicker: Disk Utility says "to resize a partition on the selected disk, drag its resize control and click apply. The size of the partition will change, but the partition won't be erased." Stupidly, I resized the window of which a decade of my crucial data was represented as a blue fraction, and clicked apply. One second later, the operation was complete, and my external HD was erased.
Two questions:
(1) why is there language about a partition not being erased when resized if it indeed is?
(2) judging from the single second this disaster took to unfold, DU did not write-over my disk, just deleted the index or some such thing. How screwed am I?
Profusest thanks for any help or input other than that pointing out my folly.
EDIT: apparently "unlike what Disk Utility dangerously implies" would have been a better choice of words.
EDIT 2: anybody know of 'undelete' software that can recover files with their original names?