Of Portable Drives and Partitions

[Stinky The Clown]

I have a 500GB LaCie "Rugged" portable hard drive with Firewire 800. Good drive, by the way.



Anyway . . . . it came with a MacOS and a Windows FAT32 partitions. I have no need of the FAT32 partition. It is just taking up space. There is no data on it.

Is there any reason to keep it? Can I delete it and recover the space dedicated to it? If I can, how do I do it? Do I need to reformat as one partition? I can easily move the data to another drive if I need to, and then move it back when done.

Thanks!

[NYC_SKP]

1. Since you have it, back up the most important 500GB in you life, then bury it.

I had a 2TB drive and two laptops stolen in September.

Data was backed up on multiple firewire drives, no loss of date despite the theft.

eom

[robinlynne]

2. I have a portable lacie. The partitioning instructions came in the manual. I would

google for and fine the manual. (Remember, they used to come on paper...)

[NV Whino]

3. I'm taking a wild guess here, based on long past experience

It used to be in the olden days that you had to reformat the entire drive in order to reformat one partition. I haven't partitioned anything in a long while so that may have changed by now.

[fpublic]

4. Repartition options

The Disk Utility that comes free with MacOS will do the reformat for you. You will lose any data that you don't backup elsewhere in this process. Disk Utility should be found in your Utilities folder in the Applications folder. There are several options for formatting that can't be adequately explained here. If the Help documents for Disk Utility are not enough, there'll be plenty of info at the usual sites, e.g. MacWorld or CNET.

There is commercial software that will shuffle current data around as it repartitions into a single partition without deleting. ( TechTool Pro costs $100 http://www.micromat.com/techtoolpro) BUT YOU ABSOLUTELY SHOULD STILL BACKUP to be safe so you might as well stick with Disk Utility.

[davidwparker]

13. I'm thinking of zapping my Bootcamp partition. I have Vista on it, but it looks like the new OS X

that I have isn't supported.

I got VMWare Fusion and have put my Windows operating system in it. I could do a clean installation of Windows 7 on the Bootcamp partition and VMWare will work with it there. But, I'm leaning towards getting rid of the Bootcamp partition, expanding the Mac drive over it, and just using VMWare.

[sir pball]

6. ^ Like he says, you can do it on-the-fly, but I never do

Maybe its just because I'm old enough to remember when there were hacks to resize partitions live and they could go horribly horribly wrong, but I always backup and erase a drive on which I'm changing the partitions. It's just a little extra peace of mind for me, if you can do it easily I'd say there's no good reason not to.

[Stinky The Clown]

7. Actually, Disk Utility will not allow a dynamic change to this drive.

I can erase and partition any way I wish (including just one partition)

As to resizing, that's grayed out with the following message:

You can't resize the partitions on this disk because it uses to Master Boot Record partition scheme

I don't really know what that means, but perhaps it is because one partition is Mac OS Extended (journaled) and the other partition is FAT 32?

I any case, I may just leave it be.

[sir pball]

8. It's apparently formatted to boot Windows

MBR is the boot-sector format that Microsoft uses. If you have any use for a Windows install you can leave it, but if not why keep the FAT32 partition at all?

[Stinky The Clown]

9. Thanks! That clarifies it.

I have no need to keep a Windows anything. The closest I get is to run a CAD program under Parallels on a different machine.

[sir pball]

10. Then trash it ASAP...FAT32 is outdated anyway.

I have no idea why it would have even shipped with FAT32; it's been all NTFS since Win2K. Hell, you can't have a file larger than 2GB on there..

[Stinky The Clown]

11. Can a Mac read NTFS?

[sir pball]

12. Read natively, write with utilities

If you need an interchange for Mac/Win, you can either get Tuxera NTFS or just format it as exFAT - it's a modern Microsoft FS that's natively supported by both Win and OS X.