OS X :: How To Partition Main Hard Drive
Feb 14, 2010
I would like to partition my main hard drive so I can install another operating system on the other one and then use either, whenever I wish.
I would prefer to do this from my external drive (Time Capsule) but I dont think the Time Capsule allows for partitions.
In Disk Utility, it shows that I have a 931.5 GB Hitachi Main Disk. Underneath that, indented, it reads Macintosh HD.
When I click on the Hitachi Disk line, it shows me the partition tab.
I can figure out how to partition it - which is to simply add and name a partition and click apply. But I would like to know if this process will erase any data from my hard drive. If it does, then it may not be worth partitioning.
View 3 Replies
ADVERTISEMENT
Jun 6, 2010
Lately I've been using my external hard drive as the main drive of my imac I5 and every day it freezes when I open 3 or 4 apps or more or while doing several stuff at the same time. This, obviously, doesnt happen when using the internal hard drive of the imac, so I suppose is due to using firewire 800 or usb 2.0. Is it normal for every external hard drive to freeze when using it as the main drive or maybe is it that my external hard drive is bad?
I'm planning on buying a more quieter external hard drive to use as the main drive of my imac, but I wont do so if it also keeps freezing every day. Any suggestions? Is it normal even when using firewire 800? When using the external hard drive I umount the internal drive of the imac. Maybe this is the reason? Its a Lacie Big Disk 500GB. Would an external SSD make a difference or would it still freeze?
View 14 Replies
View Related
Apr 27, 2012
I was trying to do some tasks in Windows 7 in VMWare fusion and it was a little laggy, so I shut down the VM and restarted my mac. It took a little longer to restart than I'm used to, but when it came back on 99% of my main hard drive is now gone. All my bookmarks in safari, user accounts, most preferences are still here but all files are gone. How could this have happened and is there any way it can be reverted without a time machine back up? It's a mid 2010 21" iMac i3 8GB ram with Lion installed all newest updates have been done prior to this happening. I don't even know what to do, so much has been lost.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
View 4 Replies
View Related
Sep 7, 2010
I bought a new internal hard drive for my late 2009 MBP and have completely cloned my existing hard drive to the new one. When I use the new hard drive through an enclosure I am able to boot from this hard drive perfectly, but when I install it into my MBP it won't read properly or something. It loads to my home screen with my dock, but when I try to click something, it just freezes up and I have to restart to the same thing every time. Anyone have any ideas on how this can be fixed?
View 3 Replies
View Related
Apr 8, 2010
got a real basic question to ask and you're gonna think im an idiot for asking...I just bought a 320gb western digital elements hard drive and want to reformat it so that its compatible for both mac and pc's. i intend to format it as NTFS-3G as it would allow me to use it on the 2 platforms without having the 4GB file size restriction that fat32 has, anyway.....
when I go to reformat my external hard drive in disk utility, I see my external hard drive to the left, and there's a "sub" hard drive as a child of the external hd listed uppermost. just wandering which one of the two do i select before going to Erase>Windows NT filesystem (NTFS-3G)>erase? Do I select the uppermost drive and erase that or the lower one? or both
View 2 Replies
View Related
Jul 27, 2009
I have an aluminum unibody macbook from October 2008. I'm looking to upgrade the 160 GB hard drive inside to a 500 GB one I'm considering from Newegg. Would it be possible to migrate/copy/clone the entire contents of my current hard drive to the 500 GB one? I also have a section of my current hard drive partitioned for Bootcamp. Would this affect my ability to transfer everything over?
If this is possible at all, how can I go about doing so? If there are steps laid out somewhere, I'd appreciate a referral. Sorry if my question is a little elementary, but I did a search on these forums and also google and nothing really came up
View 1 Replies
View Related
Jul 30, 2009
I had my hard drive partitioned into 2, where one was mac the other windows xp. I received this macbook as a gift from my sister so i wanted to reformat everything into mac. I popped in the Mac OS x install cd and just installed it. Now there is two hard drives and I am not able to re-partition it where i can bring it back to one again...I was suppose to delete windows first before re-formating my macbook.
View 9 Replies
View Related
Jul 21, 2010
I've got a Mac Pro (early 2008 edition) and I installed Windows 7 via boot camp. I no longer use the OSX on the main partition because I boot OSX on this computer from an external drive.
I would like to format the main partition (where my old OSX is) so I can use it for file storage from both OSX and Windows, but I'm afraid I might screw up the boot capabilities by doing so. Can anyone confirm that my Windows 7 boot camp partition will still boot successfully after formatting my old OSX partition to FAT32 (or whatever makes the most sense)?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Jun 4, 2010
I recently tried installing Ubuntu on my MBP. After never really using it, I deleted it and removed all the partitions. My problem is that there is still some 'empty space' (about 5 GB worth) that I cannot re-add to the main HD's partition. The space is not a partition of it's own, I can resize the partition box down to it in Disk Utility, but I get an error.
The error message is...
Partition Failed
Partition failed with the error:
Mediakit reports the partition (map) to small.
While it's not a big issue (314 out of 319 GB)
View 2 Replies
View Related
Sep 21, 2010
I'm going to buy an iMac with 1TB hard drive. I'm currently using a MacBook Pro with 320GB hard drive, and I haven't partitioned it yet. Is 1TB too big to be one partition? How do you guys partition your hard drive.
View 5 Replies
View Related
Jun 4, 2009
I'm trying to partition the internal hard drive on an Alu iMac so it also has a small FAT32 formatted portion, the only problem is, when I go to disk utility FAT32 is not an option under the drop down menu for formats. All it lets me do is Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) or something like that if I recall correctly.
View 6 Replies
View Related
Jun 15, 2009
I've got a USB hard drive. Every time I try to partition it with Disk Utility, I get an error message saying it "timed out". The hard drive used to be an OS X boot disk. The only partition it has at the moment is the blank 200MB EFI partition.
View 3 Replies
View Related
Dec 14, 2009
I've just bought a used iMac and for some reason it has 3 partitons but two have nothing on them. I've gone into Disk Utility and deleted those two but now the main Partition is still only showing as having 80GB of free space instead of the 200GB it should have. What can I do?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Feb 4, 2007
I realize this may be a stupid question but here goes... I have recently installed Windows XP with Boot Camp and now realize more than ever how much I hate XP and was wondering if it were possible to remove that partition all together from the hard drive, and I guess have it added back to my Mac OS side. I think i know the answer but just want to be sure.
View 7 Replies
View Related
Feb 16, 2009
It seems as if many people on here use dedicated boot drive with faster read times for applications. I was wondering if partitioning my boot drive would be beneficial in anyway. My boot drive in Bay 1 is a 1TB, it stores everything except my iTunes library, then in Bay 2 I have another 1TB drive that I use CCC weekly to mirror the data from drive 1. If I was to partition the boot drive to use store my applications, and system software and moved all my data (documents, pictures, videos) to the partitioned part of the drive would there be any benefit?
View 11 Replies
View Related
Feb 16, 2009
how to partition a hard drive, so I can boot a my Leopard image-file from a separate partition. who has enough patience & time to guide me through to complete this common task. I did the follow things so far to make a separate partition for my disk-image (Leopard Installer):
1. Launched Disk-Utility on Tiger 10.4.11 OS X.
2. Clicked on my hard-drive (149.1 GB).
3. Selected "Partition" in that menu (seen above the Volume Information).
4. Selected "2 Partitions" from the "Volume Scheme drop-down menu".
View 4 Replies
View Related
Mar 11, 2009
Recently I bought a Mac OS X Leopard, which comes with the Bootcamp. I have the XP operating disk, and Virtual Box, which is another program like Bootcamp. Instead of the bootcamp way of rebooting every time you switch between operating systems, Virtual Box allows both systems to run simultaneously. Instead of taking up space on my hard drive, I purchased a Seagate FreeAgent (Desk Edition) 1TB external drive.
I need to partition this drive in two, to allow the combined running of PC and Mac OS X using Virtual Box. The formats I will be using are FAT 32 and Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The latter is very easy, as I can simply do this on the Mac. However, the FAT 32... Since I am splitting the external hard drive in two, my XP PC cannot create a partition using FAT 32 which is greater than 32GB, and if I create the F32 partition using the Mac it won't be recognized by the PC operating system.
View 4 Replies
View Related
Apr 24, 2009
I am installing XP on my mac laptop and am not sure how much space to partition. The laptop's total space is about 235GB with currently 50GB free.
I will only be using Windows for a few specific programs: Autodesk: Toxik, Mudbox, Motionbuilder and Cleaner XL. I probably won't be using the programs too extensively either, I mainly use Maya and I have the OSX version of that.
Based on that info I was hoping to get a rough estimate on how much space I should partition for XP, I don't want to go too low and not be able to install and use everything but at the same time I don't want to put too much space on the XP partition either and end up with wasted space.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Jun 21, 2009
As soon as I bought my Mac I created a partition for Windows on Boot Camp. I later realized that I didn't need it, but then it was too late, 30GB of my Hard Drive was already partitioned. Is there a way to revert the process and re-claim my 30GB to use with the Macintosh system?
View 4 Replies
View Related
Jul 9, 2009
I have MBP 17", 2,53GHz, hdd is 250GB. I have a lot of music and pictures and quite lot movies. On the other side I have a lot mails. Is it better to make two partitions and keep them separate? What is your suggestion? If I decide to do that, do I need to remove everything from hard drive to make another partition? I never did it before on mac, but I remember that is necessary on windows.
View 5 Replies
View Related
Jul 23, 2009
When I try to make another partition on my harddrive (I've already made one housing windows XP), the bootcamp utility that my mac came with only gives me the option of removing the current partition. How do I make another one?
View 3 Replies
View Related
Nov 25, 2009
if I could partition my external hard drive so one half holds all my Mac OS X data such as Itunes music and the other half hold my Microsoft Windows files.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Jun 30, 2010
I just bought a new Western Digital 750GB laptop drive for my 13" macbook pro. I have a transcend external enclosure, to hook it up as an external via usb, and I had planned on using CCC to clone my existing 250gb to the new drive, and then swapping them.
However, at first plugging the drive in, my MBP didn't see it at all. The lights came on, and the drive sounded like it started... but it didn't appear in disk utility.
I unscrewed it from the enclosure, and then re-attached everything, and the 2nd time around, this time my MBP saw the drive. So it's possible (I guess) that something wasn't fully connected in the enclosure.
My first action was to open disk utility and try to partition the drive. But when I chose the "1 partition" route, I got an error when it attempted to unmount the drive, and wouldn't let me continue. So I then opted to "erase" the drive, and it did that no problem.
Then I did a "verify" on the disk, and it again reported no problem. So just for giggles, I then attempted to "partition" the drive again, and voila, same error.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Feb 13, 2012
I want to partition my iMac hard drive but it always says "verification error"
I have already reinstalled Lion but had no luck. I tried partitioning my backup external hard drive and it worked flawlessly
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3), 21.5 inch, 12gb RAM, 1Tb HD
View 2 Replies
View Related
Apr 13, 2012
I have software that only runs under 10.4 on my older Imac. I would like to partition hard drive and run 10.6 on one and 10.4 on the other. Is this possible? Can I get instructions?
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.5), Partition hard drive
View 2 Replies
View Related
Jun 4, 2014
I signed up for beta testing for Apple's new OS, OS X Yosemite and I'm currently running OS X Mavericks. I know with every new OS on any device it needs to be beta tested to fix any bugs and I use my MacBook for quite a lot. Is it possible to partition my hard drive like you do when running Windows, and run OS X Mavericks AND OS X Yosemite? The reason I'm asking is because I don't want to be stuck with an OS that's going to prevent me from doing what I need to do.
Info:
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)
View 1 Replies
View Related
Jul 23, 2008
i have a 320gb external hard drive and was wondering if i could partition it so i could use it just as an external hard drive on one partition, but have time machine on the other partition. i just recently got my frist mac, which is a macbook, and i love it.
View 5 Replies
View Related
May 14, 2009
I had windows in a bootcamp partition for a while, and today, i decided to erase the partition and make a new, bigger one. I erased it just fine, but I can't make another one, it just gives me this error: Verification failed: this disk could not be partitioned. Use disk utility to repair this disk. I went to disk utility and i clicked verify disk (repair disk was not highlighted) and it gave me another error: filesystem verify or repair failed. I also repaired disk permissions with no such luck.
View 17 Replies
View Related
Jul 2, 2009
No big deal - I partitioned the new drive in Disk Utility, made sure it had a GUID partition scheme, then used Carbon Copy Cloner to zap over my OS X partition. Boot from new drive - it works but there is an odd pregnant pause on boot up before the machine starts actually booting. I always boot in verbose mode (I like to see all the UNIXy goodness under the hood), so I see about 30 seconds of grey screen before I get the scrolling white text of OS X booting.
Now I find myself wondering if this is because of the lack of EFI partition on the new drive - but Googling around t'interweb I'm struggling to find any definitive guidance on this issue or indeed, anyone else with precisely this problem. Any bright sparks on here have any ideas?
(as an aside, I've started to recreate my Windows partition - Boot Camp assistant is quite happy to create a Windows partition and resize the OSX one, which seems not to work based on what I've read if your partitioning is wrong)
View 1 Replies
View Related
Jul 22, 2009
I have a WD 640GB External drive and i would like to partition some for time machine and some for storing my files. i just have some questions:
1) If i partition the drive into 2, in the future can i join the two partitions together again?
2) does the whole external drive have to have the same file system like HFS or NTFS or can one partition be HFS + for time machine and the other partition NTFS to make it readable on windows?
View 4 Replies
View Related
