Partitioned external hard drive question.....

[benjohnson]

I've got a Western Digital external firewire hard drive, and when I got it, I partitioned it. Simple stuff right.

Well, at the time I saw that in disk utility there was an option to lock the partition, or to not lock it. Well, wasn't sure what to do, so I just left it unlocked.

Problem is, I'm now running out of space on one of the partitions and to save having files split over both partitions I was hoping to just increase the size of one......

Because I didn't lock it in the first place, does that mean that I can just move the 'barrier'? Or will this wipe all of the data already on the partitions?

Hope this makes sense....... haha.
ben

 

[mac57]

benjohnson, this is really a question of what format the hard drive is in. You can usually resize FAT32 partitions without losing data. You usually can't with other formats.

 

[benjohnson]

They're both formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

So that means I can't resize them?

 

[mac57]

Well, I haven't tried this (so can't confirm it will work OK) but the following link:

http://www.macworld.com/2007/02/secrets/marchgeekfactor/index.php

suggests that you CAN resize the partition without losing data, using a hidden DiskUtil function.

It says it is for Intel Macs only however, but it does also provide a pointer to a third party software package that will do the same thing.

Finally, note that if you have access to an Ubuntu Live CD, you can use it as well for this function. See this link:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=89960

Good luck - changing partition sizes is always makes me sweat!