External Hard Drive Questions... (original posting by Nile36)

Original Post:
I just installed a Western Digital 500GB External HD. I partitoined the drive (one side 150 GB to be a little larger than my iMac hard drive) using Disk Utility. Now, the icon of the External Drive is still listed in my finder as 150GB but I do not seem to have access to the additional 350GB on the drive.
The initial thread has been marked as 'Answered' although there is one more thing that can be added. While I posted a resolution in the original thread I've added it here in case those interested/affected ignore the first one.
You can download and try VolumeWorks. I found it at:
http://mac.majorgeeks.com/download4983.html
I ran in trial mode to see what it was capable of and it did allow me to take a partition of 'free space' and format it as HFS+ without affecting my other, data filled test partition. Contrary to what I previously thought (and unlike the iPartition demo), it wrote the changes to the drive.
The new partition is HFS+ only. To add journaling, use the Disk Utility from Apple.
iMac Core Duo (20")   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

There's something missing in your explanation. If you're getting the "original file..." message, that would indicate that you may have had all your music files on your laptop drive at one point and them moved some of them to the external drive without using the proper procedure.
If you don't have a lot of playlists, star ratings, and that sort of information that you're trying to preserve, then Mike's suggestion is an easy way out. If you do have a lot of that kind of information, then you may need to see if you can restore your setup to its former condition, when it was all working, and then use proper procedures to move files to the external drive or whatever it was that you were trying to do.

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    Message was edited by: pumpkin person

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