Help with reformatting a hard drive partition

A few years ago I let my friend (computer science major at the time) set up my dual boot on my Macbook Pro. He used a program called Gparted live instead of Bootcamp (claimed that "it wasn't working) set up the partition and installed Windows 7. Things worked perfectly. However, he made a mistake and instead of having a 32 GB partition it was made into a 64 GB partition. Which was fine up until now, because I need some more space, and I rarely (if ever now) use Windows. So I erased the partition and tried to bring it back on my start-up Mac partition- no luck. Tried reformatting it from the Windows NTFS (not sure what it's called) format to OS X format and had same error in Disk Utility. Anyone have any ideas?

If you have a backup for your Mac volume, then this can be done using Disk Utility:
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. Click into the second partition that was the Windows partition to select it. Then click on the Delete [-] button below the partition map.
4. In the lower right corner of the sizing rectangle for the OS X partition is a resizing gadget. Select it with the mouse and drag the bottom of the rectangle down to the bottom. Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed. (Note: This may take a little time, so be patient.)
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.

Similar Messages

Help With A Full Hard Drive Partition

I'm hoping someone can help as I've searched previous threads but not found the total answer I need. I have a large external drive that is partitioned. I have completely filled one partition with itunes music and would like to create a second itunes music folder within another partition on the same drive. My goal is to synch both music folders with my 80GB Ipod. Many thanks for your time. BTW I'm using Windows XP.

Thanks very much Toons for the response. Let me make sure I understand correctly. In addition to unchecking the "copy files to Itunes Music Folder ..." option, should I change the Music Folder location to a new one within the empty partition on my hard drive? Since the current music file is located within a drive partition that is full, where will the new music I add be stored without my creating a new folder in another partition that has empty storage space?
Thanks again for your valuable assistance.

Help with unreadable external hard drive

I am having problems with an external hard drive and found your Email in yahoo answers.
I have a 'MB' external hard drive with a Mac OS X 4 11. A few days ago I turned off the Mac at the back button, after the screen went dark, I unplugged the HD only to find the Mac came on again. The Mac must have been in sleep mode? Since this time the Mac will not recognise the HD.
I tried another USB, making sure the preferences under finder is checked for all items and tried data recovery, PRAM reset, Disc Utility, which did see the drive (in gray) and it gave me this message; Error; underlying task reported failure on exit / 1 non HFS volume checked / 1 volume could not be repaired because of an error / unable to read FAT (input/output error).
I am hoping I can still use this external HD or could there be bad news ahead? I have not yet tried this on another Mac. Please can anyone help or advise? Thank you.

that was my backup!
If you truly mean a backup then that means you still have the original files on your internal drive, or wherever. You just make another backup. If you mean it was an archive/overflow drive then that's not a backup (and you should start thinking about buying another HD to save both the files on your internal and external since either of those could fail without warning).
So are you suggesting I go to a place/individual that does PC data retrieval? And does this mean I buy another external HD?
I don't know much about file recovery on PCs. If this was a Mac drive then there would be a good chance you could either use Disk Utility on your Mac already to repair it, or perhaps a utility such as Diskwarrior ($100) to do the same. That repair could be done pretty much in-place. It's only when a drive is really seriously damaged, in particularly physically, that you need a second HD. Again, this is if you could do this on a Mac.
There are supposedly Mac based recovery tools that can also recover FAT, but those would likely need a second drive and the results might not be pretty (files, everywhere, maybe without original file names).
I'd find a buddy with a PC and see if they have something on there that can do it for a cup of coffee.

Help with an external hard drive enclosure

I had a Power Mac G5 that had a motherboard which died. The hard drives were still good so I purchased the "EAGLE Consus D-Series ET-CSDU2J-BK JBOD 2Bay SATA to USB 2.0 External Enclosure". I have it on the setting which both of drives show up on the desktop individually. So far it works and everything is great but I would really like to make it so it combines both hard drives (two seagate 160GB of the same model) into one 320 hard drive. I have a macbook pro running OS X. Do i have to reformat and erase everything before I change it to spanning or can i just switch the jumper and have one hard drive image with all my data still on it? Thanks
Here is the online manual if it helps http://www.eagletechusa.com/Download/ET-CSDU2J-BK_UM.pdf

RAIDing the two will destroy the data on the drive. I'm sure that's explained in the manual.

Help with using external hard drive to boot windows on PC

Hi,
I'm not sure if this is in the right place, so apologies in advance if not. I've looked around the internet for a good while now, and I haven't found anyone in my exact position.
My PC's hard drive (running Windows 7) recently died; long story short, I am attempting to reinstall windows. The only other computer I have is this MacBook Pro, on which I have an .iso file of Windows 7. So I want to use my external hard drive (WD 500GB "MyBook") as a boot device so that I can install Windows onto my new internal hard drive.
The problem I am having is that, well, nothing seems to be working. Every time I try to load the .iso onto my external hard drive and boot my PC with it, either a blank screen appears or it says "missing operating system".
I have made sure that the BIOS is running the external hard drive as its boot priority.
I have tried using Disk Utility to partition the external drive, then using 'Restore' to load the .iso onto the partition, to no avail.
I have tried simply dropping the extracted .iso files onto the hard drive, this doesn't work.
I have also tried changing the file system of the external hard drive using the 'Erase' feature (NTFS-3G (using an addon), FAT32, exFAT, all of the others), but I notice that whenever I use Restore after doing this, the file system seems to return to Mac OS Extended, which might be why it isn't booting up on my PC. Is there any way I can succesfully partition the external hard drive in a format that will allow Windows 7 to boot (such as NTFS?), and is Disk Utility even the right program to do this?
If you want any more information from me, please let me know and I'll do my best to provide it - I'm not the most advanced mac user in the world, but I've spent days trying to fix this problem and nothing, no combination of anything, seems to work at all. So any help will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks

Here is a quick suggestion for you:
Download Virtual Box (free PC Emulator for Mac) and install Windows 7 on your Mac (don't worry about activating it yet, as you don't need to keep it more than a few hours). You can tell Virtual Box to use the ISO file as the DVD drive for your virtual Windows computer, so no need to burn a disk.
Search Google for creating a bootable USB installer for Windows 7. I found a link that gave good instructions on how to do this using DiskPart.
Follow the instructions to make the bootable USB stick for installing Windows 7 using your virtual machine you created above.
Use the USB stick to install Windows on your new PC.
Remove the virtual Windows machine from your Mac.
Remove Virtual Box from your Mac.
I found a set of instructions and built an installable USB stick last night that worked great for installing Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) onto my older ThinkPad I had sitting at home. The USB installer also installs in about half the time as a DVD install. The only reason I have you create the virtual Windows PC is that all of the instructions for makeing the Windows install USB stick are written assuming that you already have access to a running Windows PC. By doing this install, you have up to 3 days before you would need to activate it and you can build the installer USB stick and remove teh virtual computer long before that.

Need help with Raid 1 hard-drive replacement

Hello All - I hope someone can help with this.
I have a Raid 1 set-up using two 1Tb external drives (1 Seagate and 1 Lacie) which has been working perfectly - until yesterday that is. I received an error message saying the Raid 1 Set was degraded. On checking I got an error message against the Lacie HDD 'Disk failure'. Following instructions i found on Apple Support i tried to replace the failed drive with a new 1Tb drive - but then got an error message saying that the new drive was too small - on checking the original Seagate Drive reads as 999.86 Gb with the new Drive reading 999.83 Gb. I presume this is to do with formatting of the 2 drives, although one would assume (perhaps naively that as both drives are 1Tb they would be the same size when formatted!!
In light of this I ran 'verify disk' on the Raid 1 Set and this was ok and I am now attempting to rebuild the failed Lacie drive - 10 hours still to go. However even if this works I would want to replace this disk as it is quite old now. The Raid 1 Set is backed up to Time Machine on a separate HDD.
Can anyone suggest a way forward for me to swap out the old drive and replace it with the new drive that I have purchased - I can't see how exchanging this for another make would be any guarantee that the disk would be the same size? I understand that I can't replace the failed drive with a larger drive. The only other way I can see of proceeding is to buy a second new disk (same as I got today) and create a new Raid 1 set and copy everything across.
Thanks in Advance

For an external hard disk drive or other (different) system shared
storage devices to work, they probably should be formatted in a
format seen by both operating systems.
If the WD unit is not seen by Windows computers on your network,
the WD may have been formatted in HFS+ for the Macintosh. That
is OK unless you need a Windows computer to access the same.
The Macintosh can see and use a standard Windows disc format;
so the external drive may need to be reformatted away from HFS+
if that is really what is going on (and archive any data on the suspect
drive elsewhere, since it will be lost to reformatting overwrites)
and then both Mac OS X and Windows should see the files on there.
And Macs set up to run Windows may also see the non-Mac format;
without having to re-boot via BootCamp, if that option is in use.
As to the other question(s) I really have no idea at this point in time.
And since that may be the rub, hopefully someone will follow up here.
Good luck & happy computing!

Need help with networking external hard drive

Hi,
I am working on a corporate network and I have a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition external hard drive attached to a Mac OSX 10.4. i have other Macs connecting through the network to this Mac and accessing the external hard drive and it works just fine for that.
What I need help with is the fact that I also have several PCs on the same network (all XP), that need to connect to the hard drive and access the files. I've been able to connect to the Mac using the XP by accessing the IP address. I also set the Mac up with password credentials so that I had to log in to the Mac to access the files. But when I try to access the Mac, it only shows the main computer drive as the only available share and no external drive.
Does anyone know how to access a Western Digital external drive on a Mac from a PC through a network?

For an external hard disk drive or other (different) system shared
storage devices to work, they probably should be formatted in a
format seen by both operating systems.
If the WD unit is not seen by Windows computers on your network,
the WD may have been formatted in HFS+ for the Macintosh. That
is OK unless you need a Windows computer to access the same.
The Macintosh can see and use a standard Windows disc format;
so the external drive may need to be reformatted away from HFS+
if that is really what is going on (and archive any data on the suspect
drive elsewhere, since it will be lost to reformatting overwrites)
and then both Mac OS X and Windows should see the files on there.
And Macs set up to run Windows may also see the non-Mac format;
without having to re-boot via BootCamp, if that option is in use.
As to the other question(s) I really have no idea at this point in time.
And since that may be the rub, hopefully someone will follow up here.
Good luck & happy computing!

Help with using multiple hard drives

Is there a way to install the OS on an "external" (expresscard SSD) drive, but have all of the library and data files on the primary hard disk? I LOVE the speed on my SSD, but it's a pain finding stuff now. Is this something a RAID configuration could help with?

mwmmartin wrote:
I have a 1 TB hard drive; but I have a 500GB and 250GB usb external hard drives.
Wouldn't it be cool if I could make the two external hard drives a RAID drive and use Time Machine to use all the 750GB of external memory to do my backups???
You can, but I would +*strongly recommend against+* it. See +Concatenated RAID+ in the Help for Disk Utility.
There are several potential problems:
Depending on how much data is on your 1 TB drive, 750 GB may not be enough to back it up. See #1 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
To set up a +Concatenated RAID+ set, both drives will be erased.
When (not if) either drive fails, you'll lose all the data on both.
Both drives must be connected any time you do a backup or want to browse your backups.
Especially with USB, if one drive wakes from sleep, or spins up, quickly enough, but the other one doesn't, the backup may fail and/or your backups may be corrupted.
For now, it looks like my only solution is to go buy a bigger external hard drive and spend more money,,,
That's your best solution +*by far.+* Anything else is taking a large risk with your backups.

HELP with using external hard drive

Can anyone please help? I have been using Windows based PCs for a majority of my life. I recently purchased a Macbook. I have thousands of songs saved on a Maxtor external hard drive. I recently connected the HD to my Macbook and was able to successfully copy over all of the photos I have saved and only few of the audio files but not all. I checked the audio files are saved in itunes format. Why can I not copy all of my music over? Please help! When I connect HD to PC I see the missing files that cannot been seen when I connect my HD to my Macbook. Bizare, don't you think?

Any chance that the files not showing up on the Mac have file names starting with a period (.)?
Patrick

Help with installing new hard drive and transferring data?

I have a MacBook Pro 13-inch mid 2009 that is running OS X version 10.6.8. The hard drive is full and I have a new one I'd like to install, but I am awfly intimidated. I'm hoping that someone could shed some light on kindergarten-style step-by-step instructions on how to make the switch. I'm mostly concerned about the data transfer part. I've found a handy video about physically installing the drive, so I think I'll be ok there.
Here are the items I have in preperation for the switch:
• 1.0 TB Hitachi Travelstar 7200RPM Hard Drive
• Portable bus-powered USB 3.0 storage solution (to turn my old hard drive into an external hard drive)
• Tools including a small phillips screwdriver and some Torx Screwdrivers
• Time Machine Extermal Hard Drive with all of my backups
Here are some things I have read that I find to be confusing
• Some suggest I should transfer my data from the old hard drive to new new one BEFORE I install the new one. (I'm not sure how that works.)
• Some suggest upgrading to the latest OS X before transferring any data. (Would that be Mavericks? I haven't upgraded to that yet. Is that necissary?)
• Some suggest that I will need the MacBook Pro's installation disk to make the switch. (I don't know where that disk is. Do I really need it?)
If anyone can clarify any of the above issues that I've listed as confusing, that would be great. Also, if anyone can help me figure out what steps to do first, second, third, etc., that would be great.
Thanks!

Also,
Will I need the install disks for the Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft office when I put in the new hard drive?

Need help with HP dv5 Hard Drive.

I believe I need to replace my hard drive for my HP dv-5. What I need to know is can I put in any Sata 2.5HD or does it have to be the Toshiba HD that is currently installed? I understand there could be issues going with a Western Digital with drivers maybe....??? But from a cost prospective I'm think of going with a much larger capacity HD and maybe going from 5400RPM to 7200RPM. Currently I have 320GB and I'd love to move up to a 500GB or even a Terabyte.
The reason I believe my HD has crash is because when I start up my laptop it asks me to install the OS. I've been having issues with this laptop for some time now, it seems to loop at start up without ever loading. And now with this OS issue I feel it to be much easier to just purchase and replace the HD. I also have Windows Vista installed on this laptop which I feel is absolutely awful, I have Windows 7 and would love to be able to install this on my dv-5.
Additionally, I have attempted to load Windows 7 from USB flash drive onto this current dv-5 and it fails.
If anyone has any comments or suggestions, has anyone done this successfully...???
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated and thank you in advance.
Thanks,
-Scott

1TB drive will be too thick and will not fit in the drive bay, any size below that is OK, I suggest the Western Digital Scorpio Black Series 7200rpm drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007605%2050001306%20600003340&IsNodeI...
Test your memory
http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Lockups-Freezes-Hangs/How-to-test-RAM-and-HDD-Hard-Drive/td-p/...

Need Help with my External Hard Drive

Hey Guys, so i bought a 2TB WD Passport for Mac about 2 months ago...It worked great, but then i dropped it by accident. It was connected to my Mac at the time, so when it fell it disconnected from the cable and fell. Now when i connect it, the external hard drive powers on. I can feel it on like always, the little light turns on as well, its flickering as if it was in use. The thing is that it wont show up ANYWHERE on my mac. Any help?

LittleGuy16 wrote:
got dropped........It was connected to my Mac at the time
HEAD CRASH ,    your HD is extremely likely kaput
hard drive moving parts
Some of the common reasons for hard drives to fail:
Infant mortality (due to mfg. defect / build tolerances)
Bad parking   (head impact)
Sudden impact /head crash (hard drive jarred during operation, heads can bounce)
Electrical surge   (fries the controller board, possibly also causing heads to write the wrong data)
Bearing / Motor failure   (spindle bearings or motors wear during any and all use, eventually leading to HD failure)
Board failure   (controller board failure on bottom of HD)
Bad Sectors   (magnetic areas of the platter may become faulty)

Need help with my mac hard drive?

I'm running MacDrive Standard to view my Mac-enabled hard drive on my pc laptop. Worked fine for a year now. Suddenly, Word documents start becoming inaccessible, saying there's something wrong with them, my movies and TV shows on the hard drive lag, as well as viewing photos on it. Today, I take a look at it and Windows says "The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable." This prompts MacDrive Disk Repair to ask to check the volume, which it does, only to tell me no errors were found. What do I do? I've got 300 gigs of information (on a 750 Western Digital My Passport hard drive). Any suggestions would be appreciated, because I'm desperate.

I used to use MacDrive from MediaFour. I think I used versions 7 & 8 mostly. I even had 5 or 6 licenses for it so I could use my HFS+ formatted drives on my many PCs. Before I stopped using my PCs I had switched to using the Paragon HFS+ driver for Windows as it did behave a little better under Windows 7 for me.
Now, on to the real issue, your dirve is reporting corruption, but when you run the MacDrive repair option is says there is nothing wrong. Have you tried connecting the drive to your Mac and letting MacOS run a valume check and repair on it? I would think that it is quite possible for MacDrive to not find all the problems that MacOS could find and fix.

Need help with cloning my hard drive to an external

I need to clone my hard drive to an external drive so that it is bootable and able to be used still, but I also need to do a fresh system install on my macbook pro. I have alot of programs currently on my system that I don't want on the fresh install but I will still need to use them on the external if I boot off of it.
My questions are:
1. Is this possible to do
2. If so how do I do it.
Thanks in advance

So virtually 2 different systems being able to operate on the one machine?
yes and yes.
most of the prosumers here keep a pair or at least one clone of every machine they have, theyre priceless tools for recovery from HD crash, and priceless in testing and usefulness.
yes, people use a clone drive for many things including testing or 'sandboxing' new software on a clone rather than their computer.
its the best fastest way to getting back to 100% quickly after a HD crash, many many advantages.
HD clones
Advantages:
1. HD clones are the best, quickest way to get back to 100% full operation in mere seconds.
2. Once a HD clone is created, the creation software (Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper) is no longer needed whatsoever, and unlike TM, which requires complex software for its operational transference of data, a HD clone is its own bootable entity.
3. HD clones are unconnected and isolated from recent corruption.
4. HD clones allow a “portable copy” of your computer that you can likewise connect to another same Mac and have all your APPS and data at hand, which is extremely useful.
5. Rather than, as many users do, thinking of a HD clone as a “complimentary backup” to the use of TM, a HD clone is superior to TM both in ease of returning to 100% quickly, and its autonomous nature; while each has its place, TM can and does fill the gap in, say, a 2 week old clone. As an analogy, the HD clone itself is the brick wall of protection, whereas TM can be thought of as the mortar, which will fill any cracks in data on a week, 2-week, or 1-month old HD clone.
6. Best-idealized 2nd platform redundancy for data protection, and 1st level for system restore of your computers internal HD. (Time machine being 2nd level for system restore of the computer’s internal HD).
HD cloning software options:
1. SuperDuper HD cloning software APP (free)
2. Carbon Copy Cloner APP (will copy the recovery partition as well)
3. Disk utility HD bootable clone.

Looking for help with an external hard drive....read on please...

I have all of my music on an external hard drive, and that's where my iTunes "points" to for all the songs in my library. Here is my question (and please be as literal as possible, even if you think it's obvious):
When I purchase new songs from iTunes Store, they don't go directly to the harddrive (at least I don't think so). So, what steps do I need to take to get any new songs from my iTunes library onto my external harddrive? Thanks in advance. I know it should be obvious, but I've been burned by countless "obvious" functions/actions in iTunes one too many times

RAIDing the two will destroy the data on the drive. I'm sure that's explained in the manual.

Help with reformatting a hard drive partition

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for