How long to partition a 500mb drive

I just bought a Seagate FreeAgent 500mb drive that needed to be partitioned because it came formatted NTFS for PCs. How long should this take? The progress bar has not hardly moved.
Thanks.

If you are trying to format the HDD for using on a Mac, it will need to be formatted in Mac OS Extended. Here are step-by-step directions for doing so. Please note that the formatting process destroys previous formats and data on the HDD, so that zeroing the HDD is optional, and a simple erase will do. Here's how:
Formatting, Partitioning Zeroing a Hard Disk Drive
Warning! This procedure will destroy all data on your Hard Disk Drive. Be sure you have an up-to-date, tested backup of at least your Users folder and any third party applications you do not want to re-install before attempting this procedure.
Boot from the install CD holding down the "C" key.
Select language
Go to the Utilities menu (Tiger) Installer menu (Panther & earlier) and launch Disk Utility.
Select your HDD (manufacturer ID) in left side bar.
Select Partition tab in main panel. (You are about to create a single partition volume.)
Select number of partition in pull-down menu above Volume diagram.
(Note: 1 partition is normally better for an internal HDD. External HDDs usually have more than one. See Dr. Smoke’s FAQ Backup and Recovery for tips on partitioning external HDD.)
Type in name in Name field (usually Macintosh HD)
Select Volume Format as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Click Partition button at bottom of panel.
Select Erase tab
Optional: (Select the sub-volume under Manufacturer ID (usually Macintosh HD).
Check to be sure your Volume Name and Volume Format are correct.
Select on Security Options button (Tiger) Options button (Panther & earlier).
Select Zero all data. (This process will map out bad blocks on your HDD. However, it could take several hours. If you want a quicker method, don't go to Security Options and just click the Erase button.)
Click OK.
Click Erase button
Quit Disk Utility.
Open installer and begin installation process.
Please post back with further questions or comments.
Good luck.
cornelius

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How can i partition my hard drive with lion on it and install snow leopard from time machine

How do I partition my hard drive which has lion on it and reinstall os6 from my time machine?

You going to need a second harddrive. It is riskie to resize your haddrive with live data on it. You need a backup of the data. That said, you might as well copy your data to the second harddrive. Repartition. Then copy the data back. I bought a 128gig flash drive from walmart for $32.
There were repartition commands introduced in 10.4.6 to repartition the harddrive.
For what it is worth, you can non-destructively partition a harddrive from single user mode in 10.4.6 or greater. Of course, you should have a backup of the harddrive.
http://www.ffnn.nl/pages/articles/apple-mac-os-x/nondestructive-partitioning.php

How long to erase & format a drive?

Hi, how long should it take to erase and format a 640 GB internal hard drive on my Mac Pro?
My Mac Pro is an 8-core, 2.8 ghz MacPro, which I've had for about a year. It came with a 320 GB primary drive. Recently I bought a Western Digital Caviar WD6401AALS 640 GB drive so that I can run Time Machine on it. The WD drive came formatted with NTFS.
After opening Disk Utility, I selected my 640 GB drive and then selected Mac OS extended (journaling) before clicking on Erase. After less than a minute this ended with "Disk Erase failed with the error." I tried this a few more times and got the same result each time. Then I clicked on the "Repair" button but got messages that stated "Disk Utility stopped repairing 'diskOs1' because the following error was encountered."
I then selected the volume (listed under the WD 640 GB drive), with format Mac OS extended (journaling) again and clicked on Erase. This set a barber pole at the bottom right of the box into motion. It's been running, however, for over 13 hours at this point. If I try to quit Disk Utility, a dialog box comes up that states the operation is still in progress. Should I exercise more patience or is something wrong with the procedure?
Here is the last part of the log so far:
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: Preparing to erase : “disk0s1”
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: Partition Scheme: Master Boot Record
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: 1 volume will be erased
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: Name : “disk0s1”
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: Size : 596.2 GB
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: Filesystem : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: newfs_hfs: /dev/rdisk0s1: partition size not a multiple of 4K.
Can anyone tell me what the last line means? Thanks for your help.
Larry

Wow, Hatter, that's the fastest response I've ever received to a question in any forum I used!
I purchased this WD 640 GB drive from Tech for Less. It was advertised as an "Open Box" item and was supposed to be unused.
In my first few attempts I selected the WD6401AALS itself and tried to erase it. Every time I tried this, the procedure failed. This is the first part of the log:
2009-05-08 18:41:37 -0700: Disk Utility started.
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: Preparing to erase : “WD640”
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: Partition Scheme: Master Boot Record
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: 1 volume will be created
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: Name : “WD640”
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: Size : 596.2 GB
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: Filesystem : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: Creating partition map.
2009-05-08 18:43:47 -0700: Formatting disk0s1 as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with name WD640.
2009-05-08 18:43:48 -0700: Disk Erase failed with the error:
File system formatter failed.
2009-05-08 18:43:48 -0700: Erase complete.
2009-05-08 18:43:48 -0700:
2009-05-08 18:43:49 -0700: Disk Utility failed during an unspecified action with the error:
I noted that one of the entries at 18:43:48 -0700: states "Erase complete." This is followed 2 lines later, however, with "disk Utility failed during an unspecified action with the error:"
When I selected the "volume" itself and clicked on Erase, the erasing and formatting operation seemed to begin. I guess that in selecting "volume" I selected only the NTFS partition itself.
The only way I can stop the current erasing and formatting operation seems to be to pull down on Disk Utility in the menu bar and select "quit Disk Utility." This brings up a dialog box, however, cautioning that stopping in the middle of an operation can render some disks nonoperational.
My WD 640 GB drive is supposed to have the same warranty as a new WD drive - according to Tech for Less. I hope that pulling the plug this way won't void the warranty.
Thanks for your rapid response.
Larry

How do i partition external hard drive using mac

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You can use an external disk for store files and for Time Machine, but you have to create a second volume.
To create volumes on the external disk, use Disk Utility. See > http://pondini.org/OSX/DU3.html I recommend you to put as much space as you can for the Time Machine volume, because backups consume a lot and Time Machine starts deleting backups when the external disk is full

How do i partition a hard drive

How do I partition an external "my Passport" hard drive that I have already formatted for pc use so that I can use it with my MB Pro?

Select the Desktop icon of the drive. Press COMMAND-I to open the Get Info window. In the top panel you should see displayed something like this:
Look to see what's displayed for Format.

How do I partition my hard drive on the MacBook for 2 operating systems?

I am looking to partition the hard drive on my MacBook, so that I can use Leopard on half, and Windows on the other half. However,I don't know how to do this?
I personally would like it to be all Mac, but as my work applications and operating system is windows, I need to be able to do my work in windows...Help!
Also, I am looking to buy a new internal hard drive for my MacBook, somewhere between 250 GB and 500 GB. I wonder where I could get a good quality, and affordable MacBook hard drive from? It must be an internal hard drive, and must be a good quality product that doesn't hurt my machine.
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[HERE'S|http://eshop.macsales.com/Search/Search.cfm?Ne=5000&Ntt=2.5harddrive&Ntk=Primary&Ns=P_Price%7c0&N=6892] a site that I like for finding HD's and memory.
As far as windows goes, you need to decide how you're going to run it on your machine. Duo-boot like BootCamp or virtualization like Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion. Once determined, they each have their methods for allocation of disk drive space for windows. BootCamp works you through partitioning your drive while Parallels and VMWare sets up a virtual drive in the size you determine.
From experience, you will need less space for windows than you think. I made a 30GB virtual drive for xp and ended up cutting it back to about 8GB.
-GDF

How do I partition my hard drive for boot camp?

Model Name:          MacBook Pro
Model Identifier:          MacBookPro1,2
Processor Name:          Intel Core Duo
Processor Speed:          2.16 GHz
Number Of Processors:          1
Total Number Of Cores:          2
L2 Cache:          2 MB
Memory:          2 GB
Bus Speed:          667 MHz
Boot ROM Version:          MBP12.0061.B03
SMC Version (system):          1.5f10
Serial Number (system):
Hardware UUID:          00000000-0000-1000-8000-0016CB982183
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State:          Enabled
Okay so this is my machine. I want to run Boot Camp and to install Windows XP onto the machine as I need to use certain windows programmes for my business as well as the Mac stuff.
I have no idea how to partition some of my free 26gb space to create a drive to install windows onto?
Can any help please?

dpx wrote:
If you do really want to partition your hard drive then you need to look in your utilities folder for disk utility.
Once this is open, click on your hard drive image in the left hand column and then you will see a partition tab. Here you can split your HD into two partitions. Call one of them XP or something like that so that you know where to install windows.
It's quite safe and you can always go back to one big partition if things do not work out.
Remember though to backup first...
To the OP
Do not heed this advice, you should use Boot Camp Assistant to create the partition for Boot Camp, do not use Disk Utility.

How to Backup & Partition Internal Hard Drive

I have a macbook pro 2.4ghz. I need to partition my hard drive to have a separate volume for photoshop scratch disk. How do I actually back up the drive prior to the reformatting? Do I create a bootable clone to restore the main volume.
Specific steps would be very helpful. Thanks

So, using Carbon Copy Cloner I first do a full copy of my internal drive (the one I will partition). This will copy any data files as well, correct? I then format the internal drive, creating the partition I need (making sure one is adequate to hold my back up/full copy). How do I then restore the full copy from the external drive to the internal partition? Does this include the OS or do I need to reinstall that and run for all of the updates, etc?
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Cloning will copy your data files, OSX, OS9, updates, etc., everything. It makes a _complete, bootable duplicate_ of your internal drive when used in full copy mode. So you need to start off with the external firewire empty, or not care about anything on it because it will all get erased.
First, repair permissions on your internal and make sure it is in a healthy condition. Then use CCC as I instructed in an earlier post and clone your internal to the external. Run Disk Utility and verify the external drive just to make sure there weren't any problems while cloning. Then go into your System Preferences, Startup Drive, select OSX that should now appear on your external, and restart. This does double duty of making sure that your clone really is bootable, and you are now working off your external drive so you can work on your internal drive from the external drive (no need for startup disks). Things should look pretty much identical to how they looked when you were working off your internal except your external drive will probably be positioned in the upper right hand corner instead of your internal.
Oh, if you have like 90 GB of files this can take quite a while.
Once you have established the external drive is working you can start up Disk Utility and partition your internal drive. Unless you need me to I will have breakfast now instead of doing a blow-by-blow account of that. Just keep in mind that if a "get info" of your external drive says you have xx.xx GB of stuff then you need to make sure one of your internal partitions is at least that size. Oh, it is probably a good idea to make the first partition on your internal drive the one to which you will re-clone (if that is a word) your original drive contents; the one with the operating system.
Once you have partitioned, you run CarbonCopyCloner and again use full copy mode to copy the things on your external onto one of the internal partitions. Run verify on the internal partition just to make sure all looks good. Use Startup disk to choose the internal's copy of OSX as startup and reboot.
At this stage you have one bootable internal partition with everything that used to be on that drive, and an external drive that is bootable. I find the latter very handy because Disk Utility requires you be booted from a different drive that that which you are repairing and using startup disks is slow.
You also now have a backup of your internal drive. If you want to, in future you can use CCC in non-full mode to backup your main internal partition. It will just copy off modified files, but you can read the details in the CCC Readme.
Brian

How to create partition in c drive in window7

hi,
I have HP pavilion dv6-Windows 7 home basic 64-bit , ofter recovery we have create partition in C drive but can't farmate. there is shown the facility avail in selected disks.
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Mohan Singh

Hi,
Please use "Disk Management" to check first. Depending how many partitions are there, it is not recommenced to have more than 4 partitions on a physical disk.
Please use this tutorial to perform other tasks if you wish:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/ht/disk-management-windows-7.htm
Regards.
BH
**Click the KUDOS thumb up on the left to say 'Thanks'**
Make it easier for other people to find solutions by marking a Reply 'Accept as Solution' if it solves your problem.

How long to erase new hard drive

Hi!
I am replacing the hard drive for my imac a1173.
The original drive was a WD Caviar 1600JS. I ordered a WD Caviar 500GB sata III 7200 RPM 16MB cache.
I was reading of the need to jumper the drive to limit the transfer to 1.5 GB/s and I did following directions from WD web site.
I installed the drive and I ran Disk Utility as the drive was not showing up as destination to install OS X.
Well Disk Utility shows the drive (465.8 GB WDC WD5000...) - Untitled.
I selected it and started the Erase process. Volume format Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and as Security Option I left the default option (Do not erase data) as I think this was going to be the fastest way.
My question is: how long does it take for DU to get the drive ready?
The erase process has been running for almost a day now. I left the computer on and this morning I still see the colored wheel turning. Not sure what to do. It seems frozen to me but it may be running in the background as I was reading it may take a loooong time to format a drive depending on the speed of the CPU etc.
Since my imac is old, I think it may be normal to take all this time, but I am not sure so I would like to hear from you.
Do you think the drive is not compatible and that's why DU cannot erase it? Should I order a different drive?
Do you think I should let it run and wait for the erase process to complete?
Please advise...thank you

There has been reported problems with that WD Caviar drive.
Also you didn't mention what iMac you have
Since about 2009, one can't replace the internal boot drive on iMac's due to software Apple installs on the drive we can't get. The fans will race if you manage to get it to work.
http://blog.macsales.com/10146-apple-further-restricts-upgrade-options-on-new-im acs

How long will allocating a new drive take?

Currently, we have a Xserve with a RAID 5 array with 6 drives allocated and one hot spare. I am going to add the hot spare to be a regular part of the array. They are all 500GB modules. Can anyone give me an idea of how long it will take to allocate the new drive space? I know it took about 3 days to initialize the original 6 drives. Should I expect that it will take a much shorter time, or is it just about the same regardless of how many drives it is allocating?
TIA.

Just to clarify- you know that you will need to
remove the HFS+ filesystem and replace it with a new
file system in order to utilize the additional space.
(Backup, erase, make new volume, restore data)
Good point. I didn't even think that far into it. Thank you very much for your reply. This will help plan it all out.
Mac Pro Quad Xeon 2.0 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

How long to partition a 500gb hard drive under disc utility

i opened disc utility for the purpose of erasing a drive and restoring it. following the erase portion, it automatically started partitioning it. this operation has been going on for 1 day and 4 hours! someone help!

etcetera wrote:
I have two 300GB drives I plan to mirror.
Now how many partitions and of what sizes do I create given 300GB size?That's up to the administrator.
Should I put everything except swap under / ?That's what I do, but others might prefer other setups.
Do I need a separate partition for /tmp, /var, /usr, /opt and so on?No. But that doesn't mean that they might not be useful in some cases.
Darren

How to best partition an external drive for my purposes?

Hello, please help,
I've just bought a Western Digital 'My Passport' 320Gb USB (no firewire) portable external harddrive for backing up my data prior to iMac repair.
I also plan to totally wipe my PPC iMac and reinstall it with Leopard.
I erased the external HD, zeroing out the data from it's previous owner, and reformatted it as Mac OS Extended (not journaled).
Now I realise that it might be even more useful than I'd imagined.
I'd now like to partition it so I can use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable copy of my entire iMac while using the rest of the drive as a separate partition for just backing up data.
Ideally I want to be able to use the drive on both Intel and PPC Macs and even PCs, is this possible? How should I format the drive to achieve this?
I've heard I should format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) HFS+, what ever that is
I'm currently running OS 10.4.11 but plan to buy Leopard and install that after the wipe.

17" 1.9Ghz iMac G5 (iSight)
I've just bought a Western Digital 'My Passport' 320Gb USB (no firewire)
I'd now like to partition it so I can use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable copy of my entire iMac while using the rest of the drive as a separate partition for just backing up data.
Ideally I want to be able to use the drive on both Intel and PPC Macs and even PCs, is this possible? How should I format the drive to achieve this?
For what you want to do, there is a mismatch between your PPC computer and the external drive that you bought.
With a few exceptions, a PPC Mac requires a firewire external drive for booting and will not boot from a USB drive, regardless of which OS is installed and regardless of the partition scheme and volume format on the drive. I also have an iMac G5, and mine will not boot from USB.
If you do exchange your drive for a firewire drive, do not get another Western Digital model to use with your G5 - many external WD firewire drives will not boot a PPC mac. See [this page|http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/stdadp.php?pfaqid=1787]
If you want to keep your present USB drive, you can still partition it with one partition for a backup clone and another for "other stuff". With respect to immediate use for recovering your stuff after a clean Leopard install on the HD, I think that Migration Assistant will still work, though I haven't tried this. As for the future, the problems with a clone not being bootable are 1) You can't test it to see if it works OK, and 2) If you do need to restore from it you'd need to boot from "somewhere else" - I think you could boot from an install disk and use Disk Utility's Restore feature to clone it back.
With regard to PC access, a PPC mac normally requires an Apple Partition Map partition scheme on the drive for booting, and such a scheme does not allow for the FAT32 volume format that is readable by PCs. However in this case since your PPC mac can't boot from it anyway, you could partition the drive as GUID. This would allow the main volume to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for the nonbootable clone, and would allow the extra volume to be formatted as FAT32. If you eventually got an Intel Mac, a clone from it to the main volume would also then be bootable.
But what I would do, if feasible, is exchange the USB drive and get a non-WD firewire drive instead.
Message was edited by: jsd2

How long to format external hard drive?

I'm planing to use a 750GB Western Digital myBook external drive as my backup drive for Time Machine. I am using Disk Utility to format the drive as a Mac OS External (Journaled) volume. The drive has been formating for nearly 10 hours now, which seems to be way too long. There is a message next to the progress bar which reads "newfs_hfs: /dev/rdisk2s1: partition size not a multiple of 4K." I thought I would close Disk Utility and retry, but I got a warning not to interrupt an operation in progress.
Should I force quit the Disk Utility, or should I wait it out a little longer? And, in layman's terms, what does the message mean?

Ok, I did a little research and discovered that WD drives have problems being formatted with Disk Utility. I downloaded and installed a program called MacDrive 7 (it has a 5 day free trial). It's a Windows program, so I booted into Windows and was able to format the WD myBook as a Mac OS volume. Took 40 seconds! Time Machine is backing up my system on the WD drive as I am typing this. Don't know if I'm allowed to post links, but a search of MacDrive will easily get you to the program. Hope this helps anyone else who has problems with the WD drives.

Help - How do I partition my internal drive???

Hi All,
I have never partitioned my drive before but I need to have os 10.4 and 10.3 on the same computer. But I have no idea how to do it...please help!
I would appreciate any help or advice you can offer!
P.

paulrk:
I concur with Matt's advice. Unless it is absolutely to have both OSs on the same internal HDD, Matt's suggestion to install them on separate partitions on an external Firewire HDD is the way to go. I have a 250 external FW HDD on which I have my internal HDD backed up on one partition, my wife's Pismo on a second, Panther and Jaguar on additional separate partitions and a large partition I call Scratch. I can then boot from either Jaguar, or Panther if I need to do that.
Of course, you did not explain why you need to do what you asked, and it may well be that your idea is the best solution to your problem. Please post back and let us know, or with further questions or comments.
Good luck.
cornelius

How long to partition a 500mb drive

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