Disk Utility - Resizing partition

I'm currently in the middle of resizing an external disk partition. It's a 250 gig partition on a 500 gig drive. Disk Utility progress bar indicates "Shrinking disk" and it's been doing this for the past 12 hours uninterrupted.
Is this normal? How long should I continue to wait? Is there any way I can safely abort the procedure? How can I tell if it's still working normally?

Ok, I aborted the procedure. It had been running about 32 hours until then. Thought I'd post an update in case this happens to anyone else.
Disk Utility was still responsive -- I told it to quit, and it warned me it was in the middle of the operation. Finder crashed in shutdown and after waiting a few minutes I killed the power by holding in the power button. Unplugged the external drive's power and the firewire cable to my mac, powered back up, plugged it in, and ... all files, folders are still there. Disk Utility shows no changes were made to partition.
I have no idea what the cause of this may have been. I captured sample processes from the Disk Utility.app and diskmanagementd. Someone knowledgeable about that this process might be make a determination.
I'm taking this as a lesson not to modify partition sizes of external drives. Backing up the entire drive and completely repartitioning the drive is the only safe way to go.

Similar Messages

  • Disk Utility - Resize Partition

    I'm using Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro (i7, 2.7 GHz). I have a 500 GB HD that is divided into two partitions of 300 and 200 GB each.
    I want to resize them in order to obtain two equal partition. Using Disk Utility, I was able to reduce the size of the top one (the one with the OS) but I cannot find a way to enlarge the bottom one to fill the blank space in between. In fact, I cannot drag the separator upwards, but only downwards (see the picture).
    Any clue on how I might solve this without erasing all the data and create a band new partition? Thanks in advance.

    Hmmm, not sure what you did to get what you have, but you cannot enlarge the bottom partition. You can only enlarge the top partition. My suggestion:
    Delete that bottom partition. Drag the sizing gadget on the top partition all the way to the bottom. Click on the Apply button. When this is finished click in the resulting single partition then click on the Add [-] button which should automatically divide into two equally sized partitions. Click on the Apply button.
    Now, this will erase whatever is on the lower partition you now have, but not the upper partition on which you have OS X installed. Be sure you have backups of your data before proceeding as a precaution.

  • Disk Utility resize results in corrupt BootCamp partition

    Hello,
      Yesterday I decided that I wanted to put Linux on my system: taking what was already a fully working boot camp partitioned drive, resizing the main mac partition to free up some space, and then install debian on that. I went into Disk Utility and resized the drive and that worked just fine, except that when the process was complete my boot camp partition was no longer bootable. It is also no longer labeled BOOTCAMP in the diskutility (though it is when I use diskutil list on the command line), but instead named after its block device (disk0s4 in this case).
    I've tried everything I can think of. Disk Utility quickly became useless (repair disk? can't repair disk!), and any sort of attempt to mount the disk on the command line just gives me an "Input/output error," so no dice there. I really need the data off this partition and from what I can tell it seems that the partition is intact, its just the partition map that has been corrupted. I also tried rEFIt's gptsync utility which also did not work. Any suggestions would be very welcome, it's very important that I get the data off this partition.

    Honestly, had this process even gotten to a point at which I was on my way to a triple boot I would be much more inclined to agree with you. Yes, I did make a mistake of not backing up before the resize, totally willing to admit that. Of course, that course of discussion leads nowhere in terms of solving this problem. We all know to back things up, most of us do, some don't, nothing new here..
    Having said that, this problem has nothing to do with a triple booting. This problem stemmed completely from a simple resize of a HFS+ partition in Disk Utility (a partition, I might add, that was extremely large and mostly free, so overwriting data in the shrink was also not a concern). As far as I'm concerned, if Disk Utility can't resize the partition without destroying/corrupting data, then they shouldn't offer it as a feature. At very least display some sort of message. Maybe: "Hey there! This process USUALLY works, caveat emptor!" I might have been inclined to use _any_ other product.
    I'm in the process of using Data Rescue 3 to analyze the drive, and hopefully retreive most of the files. As I previously stated, the actual problem here appears to be completely with a corrupt partition map (Data Recue is having no problem accessing the files so far), but I just don't have the time to dig too deeply into how that all works to solve the problem.

  • Can Lion disk utility dynamically partition a drive?

    Can Lion disk utility dynamically partition a drive? I see many posts that Leopard Disk utility can but nothing about Lion.

    Yes. I'll post a link to instructions. Be sure to create a full reliable backup before you begin (don't just do the backup, test the backup to be sure it's good), and the only application that should be running until the process is complete is Disk Utility.
    http://osxdaily.com/2009/11/20/resize-partitions-in-mac-os-x-with-disk-utility/
    Some people have problems resizing partitions because of the hidden Recovery HD partition. It sometimes gets in the way because Disk Utility can move it "up" but cannot move it "down".

  • I want to partition an external device for OSX and Windows.  Opened Disk utility but Partition is not an option

    I want to partition an external drive for OSX and PC.  Went to Disk Utility but Partition is not an available option.

    Why not? does the partition tab not exist?

  • Disk Utility: "Modifying Partition Map"

    Good Afternoon all. Im not sure whether this is a problem or not but i have run disk utility to partition my hard drive, and as of now it has been running for over 24 hours.
    700 Gb Hdd Partitioned at 487 ( Mac OSx ) and 210 ( Windows NTFS )
    The 210 was partitioned by Bootcamp and xp is installed and runs fine
    I am attempting to partition the 210 by 55 to allow for the inclusion of Vista
    I ran Disk utility yesterday around 9 or 10 and since then it has been saying modifying partition map.
    i dont believe it's frozen or has stalled because it responds and i have burned a disk using disk utility. however if i attempt to close it it warns me of damage.
    so my issue is whether or not i should just wait it out or if there is something safe i can do. Additionally if installing vista there is a bad idea i would like to be advised.
    Thanks In Advance

    It's most likely stuck and not going to finish. I experienced this once while creating a new partition for testing purposes. Force quiting will loose any unsaved changes including a partition that's being modified but it looks like your only option at this point. It should not affect your current Mac partition however I'm unsure if it will affect your XP partition. Boot camp works well but in general I would say it's not a good idea to try and re-size or split existing partitions that have data. To do what you want to do you could use Boot camp to create another partition but it would only take the space from your Mac volume. You would probably have to backup or make an image of your XP system then start over using Boot Camp to create the 2 partitions of the size you want.
    FYI: You would probably have a better chance getting an answer for this question over in the Boot Camp forum.
    George

  • Is Disk Utility "shrinking partition" for a week doing a defrag?

    And can I ever stop it, or will partition self destruct?
    Summary:
    2TB Partition, containing 1600-1700 GB (maybe 350GB free)
    Attempted to Resize partion to 1.99TB (reducing size only 10GB) using DU GUI
    Assumed it would take just a little while to move [up to] 10GB data into free space.
    That was a week ago!  External 2TB drive on USB2, activity light flashing big time, random, misc short pauses (no patterns so looks like it's really working) 24/7 ever since.  Disk Utility says "Shrinking volume" with status bar about 60% complete and not moving since soon after beginning the process.
    This archive wasn't backed up (stupid, I know).  So I bought another drive to do that with, but wanted to do a block copy to save time and to do that the program needed the source volume to be a tiny bit smaller in order to fit my destination.  (Stupid again, for the attempt before it was backed up.  I should have just done a simple copy!)  Yes, I've been kicking myself for a week now.
    Some programs that do nondestructive volume or "filesystem" shrinking will do a complete defrag in the the process I believe.  Is that what's happening here?  Anybody know for sure? Can it really take this long with maybe 340GB free to work with?  I can't think of anything besides defraging that could explain this behavior.  Seems unlikely but could indexing be kicking in?  How many more days/weeks/months might I have to wait?  I really need this to be over.
    If I stopped it, I wouldn't mind losing any one file (or a few), I just don't want to risk losing it all.  The Drive is an archive of mostly media files.  Many large files exist from 1.5GB to maybe 5GB, with few up to maybe 18 GB.  Lots of small files too.  All are rarely accessed and never edited (re-written) so I would guess there's not much cause for fragmentation.
    Now to make matters worse, I use this computer for other things, and 3 days into the shrink, most of the computer froze.  Mouse moves but nothing is clickable. Clock stopped updating.  Can't bring up Force Quit.  At day 5 I tried again and noticed the dock would appear and magnify, until it froze too.  Drive still seems to be working with activity so I presume the shrink process is still alive.  I don't know if it will survive to completion however. How bad would things be if I just powered it off?????  Any other solution besides just wait for an unknown length of time?
    Thank you for any help, and for not kicking me again while I'm down.
    Mac Mini (Late 2009) 2.24Ghz, 4GB, 10.6.5

    UPDATE: After more than three weeks of continuous disk activity, power to the external drive was accidentally turned off.  After rebooting the Mac and connecting the drive, all data seemed to be there, and was readable, and the drive was writable.  I attempted to back up the whole drive at once with a Finder copy (no OS on this drive) but it failed partway through.  A group of files copied with zero data, which I presume happened at the failure point with an incomplete write operation.  A piecemeal copy worked however, and all data was backed up intact I believe.  My guess is that some corrupted file caused all the problems (never located though), but it could have been a hard drive issue too.  If I learn more I'll do one more update.  But the point is, that simply stopping this failed shrinking process midstream did NOT destroy the partition or volume info, FWIW, although everywhere I looked on the web this prospect appeared very gloomy.  Bottom line, shrinking a partition of data without a backup is still a very risky prospect, and I will certainly never attempt it again.  I consider myself extremely fortunate that I did not lose it all, or even any!  OTOH, stopping a shrink is not guaranteed to have the dire consequences that one would suspect.  More testing would be necessary.

  • Disk Utility Bootable partition on the fly?

    It seems I CAN make a partition on the fly in OSX mountain lion, without erasing anything (yes, I have the GBs). If I make a new partition and install Snow Leopard, is this partition bootable? Do Ihave to make any adjustments in Time Machine? Thanks, Henrik

    If you use a Snow Leopard DVD and your computer can boot from 10.6.3, then you can boot from the partition. What model do you have? Did it come with Snow Leopard discs? If it did, then use those discs to install Snow Leopard.
    Do you know how to add the new partition? If not see the following:
    To resize the drive do the following:
    1. Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
    After the main menu appears select Disk Utility and click on the Continue button. Select the hard drive's main entry then click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
    2. You should see the graphical sizing window showing the existing partitions. A portion may appear as a blue rectangle representing the used space on a partition.
    3. In the lower right corner of the sizing rectangle for each partition is a resizing gadget. Select it with the mouse and move the bottom of the rectangle upwards until you have reduced the existing partition enough to create the desired new volume's size. The space below the resized partition will appear gray. Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed.  (Note: You can only make a partition smaller in order to create new free space.)
    4. Click on the [+] button below the sizing window to add a new partition in the gray space you freed up. Give the new volume a name, if you wish, then click on the Apply button. Wait until the process has completed.
    You should now have a new volume on the drive.
    It would be wise to have a backup of your current system as resizing is not necessarily free of risk for data loss.  Your drive must have sufficient contiguous free space for this process to work.

  • Disk Utility - smallest partition size

    I have new 500 GB external drive. Using Disk Utility I created GUID partition schema and created 4 partition - 3 x Mac OS Extended (Journaled) a 1 x FAT32 (initially with same size). Disk Utility doesn't let me resize 1st partion (the highest one) and 4th partition (the lowest one) smaller then cca. 50 GB (divider with 2 arrows changed to divider with 1 arrow). (I don't know if it's possible with other partitions to size them smaller then cca. 50 GB since I want them have large and I use disk already.) I didn't find anything about this in help, books or internet.
    Is there limit in Disk Utility about minimum partition size? (It looks like cca. 10 % from drive size).

    V.K. wrote:
    it looks like DU will not allow you to create a partition smaller than one tenth of the disk size.
    when i do it on a 200GB drive the smallest size it let's me make is 20Gb, and for a 500GB drive it's 50GB.
    I guess that's a safeguard against creating too many partitions.
    Message was edited by: V.K.
    I thought so. Like most filesystems, all the information must be stored in the bootsector or whatever it's called with BSD, and the total number of files is related to the sizes and total numbers of partitions, so like FAT32 or even NTFS, HFS has it's practical and theoretical limits.
    I believe HFS has two bootrecords or equivalents, one for backup and this adds to the storage space issue.
    Going back to the old 1.44MB floppies, the unformatted size was over 1.7 MB and Norton and MS took advantage of that, but not all disk readers were happy with what they did. MS once shipped Windows on a set of 1.7 MB floppies. Of course this was BC (before CDs).

  • Data loss Lacie 500GB external drive_ disk utility changed partition!

    Details of problem. I have a 500GB Lacie mini hub HDD which is used with an iMac angle poise. Recently it has been playing up- unable to access folders/files etc. and since I know the PSU fails on these items (capacitors fail -5V and 12V go haywire- already fixed another one - I have a 320GB with a mac mini setup) I removed unit from the imac and connected in place of the 320GB lacie on the mac mini, using the known good PSU. The iMac is running latest 10.4 and mac mini is running latest snow leopard 10.6.1
    The Lacie spun up and mounted OK and I was able to access all files folders with no issue, so since I was keen to make sure it was 'fixed' I ran disk utility. It ran and said it verified and then I realised I hadn't run repair so re-did this. Big mistake!
    It did the same run and said no problems found, but it then said something like updating partition! Horrified I waited and it seemed to finish or had finished straight away. Not sure. I looked at folders and yes main 2 items in place, but nothing showing below this. ****. It got worse. I ejected and tried to reconnect and low and behold it says drive needs formatting now. Disk utility even shows this 500GB as having 2.2TB of space, which I see in other posts is another issue.
    I have important data backed up elsewhere, but there are a large number of files I do not have copies of and suspect there is a way to recover these. I have since seen all the 'data loss' guest account issues and wonder if this is yet another bug in snow leopard.
    Have tried running Techtool Pro 5.0.6 to see if it can see the data but its not seeing anything. Will try Diskwarrior and others, but may well shelve to see if apple gets an os update released for data loss issues.
    Any thoughts on how to recover? Anyone with a similar issue? I am pretty certain this is not a failed hard drive as it sounds 100% normal. Thanks for any help or guidance.

    Thanks for all the comments recieved. V.K. made me re-evaluate what I had proved or not. I was fairly certain (not 100%) that the drive mech was OK, because the psu had failed, but should have proved drive mech was actually OK. So I removed the mech (as USB abd firewire can't do SMART etc.) and hooked up to an old G4 Powermac. I then found that the SMART verified, but had forgotten the 128GB limitation on older macs. So removed and got a PC to hook it up and run latest IBM_Hitachi drive fitness and other diags. (its a Deskstar HD and I have had almost zero issue with these drives over the years.) It checks out fine, so I was correct in my initial thoughts, only the PSU was faulty.
    So back to my initial suspicions that Snow Leopard or disk utility has screwed things up, maybe a bug, maybe not. And I did run verify first and it said it was OK, only when I re-ran the repair did it then do a "partition update" (or whatever it said - should have done a screen capture - searched apple but can't find listing of all mesgs avail. must be in developers site I expect). So I am back at looking at how to recover, if at all possible, but as Alsoft have said this is not something Diskwarrior can do directly. Files must still be there just partiton map is now in a ... needs to be initialised mode. Not that I will do that.
    So I guess summary is possible bug/funny in 10.6 and/or disk utility.
    sounds like I will be contacting Alsoft now
    may read up on partition map damage first, so I get a better picture of whats involved.
    Cheers and thanks for all the help/ideas.
    BTW - been using macs_pcs for decades now and helping friends & family fix things as and when. This is first time needed to post on forum as always found answers to questions I had previously. Must remember the old adage of not jumping onto new technology until it has bedded down I bet if I had hooked up to the old G4 Powermac I wouldn't be in this position. Thanks again.

  • Using Disk Utility to partition drive

    After downloading a system update yesterday my mac mini hard drive is no longer bootable. The recovery HD is unbootable, too.
    When I boot up using the install CD I can run Disk Utility and see that there are no problems reported with the hard drive, but I cannot repair permissions (No valid packages).
    If I restore the operating system from the CD my only option is to erase the hard drive.
    But what if ...
    I create a new partition using Disk Utility?
    There's loads of free space on the drive, but if I attempt to create a new partition will I wipe out existing data?
    If I succeed in creating a new partition would I be able to restore the operating system there without erasing the hard drive?
    Would it be possible then in some way to restore my user account data?
    I'm just trying to avoid the hassle of re-installing my applications and recovering my data files from backup. It seems like the data is still all there on the hard drive except that something went wrong during the system update that renders the disk unusable.
    Any help appreciated.

    Yep, that is too old...
    Mac mini
    Mac OS X Install Disk 1
    Mac OS X version 10.4.7
    AHT version 3A102
    Disc version 1.1
    2Z691-5887-A
    Mac OS X Install Disk 2
    Disc version 1.0
    ZZ691-5860-A

  • BootCamp nor' Disk Utility will Partition my Drive.

    Alright, So Im back again, And this time I have a totally different topic.
    Today I tried to Partition my drive to add another OS, to be specific, Windows 7 (Don't hate me! :P)
    The first step I took was using BootCamp SINCE, It is for windows installation on Mac OS X.
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    I hit okay, then go to Disk Utility, And try to partition my disk from there, I will select how big of a partition I want leaving about 6 gigs on my main partition. I hit "Apply" and then it starts to partition, but the only thing it does is, "Modifying the partition map" for about 5 minutes and then I get a warning message saying, "Partition failed. Partition failed with the error: Filesystem verify or repair failed." Im not really sure what this means, but after this, I try to Verify and Repair my disk. It does the "Verifying" stage for about 8 minutes and then tells me "First Aid Failed. Disk Utility stopped verifying "Macintosh HD" because the following error was encountered: Filesystem verify or repair failed." In the "Details" box, this is what it says,
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    Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
    Checking Extents Overflow file.
    Checking Catalog file.
    Checking multi-linked files.
    Checking Catalog hierarchy.
    Checking Extended Attributes file.
    Checking volume bitmap.
    Checking volume information.
    Invalid volume file count
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    Invalid volume directory count
    (It should be 117223 instead of 117222)
    The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.
    Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed."
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    If you are going to repair a startup volume then you must do this:
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    Your error suggests some major defect with the hard drive. If it cannot be repaired you will have to re-partition the drive. This will erase everything on the drive, so be sure to backup first.
    Also, you cannot install Windows on a partition your create with Disk Utility. You must use Boot Camp Assistant on a drive with a single partition/volume using GUID partition map and formatted Mac OS Extended, Journaled.

  • Recovery/Disk Utility/Verifying Partition

    Hello and thanks in advance for any help you can offer!
    My 1 year old started typing away as I booted up my laptop yesterday morning (MacBook Pro). Somehow she sent me into Recovery Mode and I can't get out. I haven't used Time Machine, I can't reinstall osx via the internet because my backup harddrive is the only one visible, and now (not initially) when I try to verify in Disk Utility so that I can back up via external drive the partition (disk0s2) has errors. I foolishly tried to find answers and terminal command fixes so I don't know if I've irreparable caused damage that way. The errors I receive when I try to verify and fix the partition: invalid content in journal; invalid b-tree node sizes; volume could not be verified completely; invalid content in journal; error: disk utility can't repair disk... M'aidez!

    When I reboot this way (holding down Shift) I do get returned to Recovery Mode. In Disk Utility, here are the drives listed:
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    disk1
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    Invalid content in Journal
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    volume could not be verified completely
    invalid content in journal
    error: disk utility can't repair disk

  • Using Apple "Disk Utility" to partition a disk drive

    I have seen some incorrect info on the forums about partitioning disks.
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    To do this will erase the new partitions you create, so BE CAREFUL.
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    It looks like the mountable image option only applies to NTFS partitions. The preferences interface does not show a choice for FAT32.

  • Disk utility not partitioning usb thumb drive

    Here is the log from disk utility
    Dec 15 23:49:38: Disk Utility started.
    Unmount of “disk1s1” succeeded
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    This particular drive has two partitions on it currently, one of which is a DOSFAT_16_SHidden. I have been trying to play around and get this thing to format for a few days now on Linux, windows and my Mac. Should I just give up on it or what?

    Master Boot Record. Do this:
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    1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
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