Partitioning 1TB with Disk Utility

I have 1TB external drive which I want to partition, but I have some questions regarding format, size, compatibility with both Snow Leopard and Windows (eugh, but necessary). Can someone help me out? I have a few gaps.
_*Main Questions*_
_*Partition A: for TimeMachine*_
Format: Should it be Mac OS Extended Journaled...? is that right?
_*Partition B: for Bootcamp*_
Format: I don't know. Should it be FAT? or Mac OS Extended?
Size: I don't know? Can someone recommend?
_*Partition C: Everything else (Media etc)*_
Format: I don't know? I need this to be compatible with 10.6 and Windows.
_*Other questions*_
a) Do I need to Erase first, re format, then create partition?
b) What is RAID?
c) Do I need to change something in Options? There's Master Boot - GUID - Apple Partition Map,
What do I choose?
Help.

Ninda wrote:
I have 1TB external drive which I want to partition, but I have some questions regarding format, size, compatibility with both Snow Leopard and Windows (eugh, but necessary). Can someone help me out? I have a few gaps.
_*Main Questions*_
_*Partition A: for TimeMachine*_
Format: Should it be Mac OS Extended Journaled...? is that right?
Yes
_*Partition B: for Bootcamp*_
Format: I don't know. Should it be FAT? or Mac OS Extended?
Size: I don't know? Can someone recommend?
I would make a bootable clone of my internal disk volume on partition B. The clone will provide a fail safe mechanism for disaster recovery. If you decide to do so, then the partition should be GUID.
As far as I know, you cannot run Windows from an external drive even if using Boot Camp. I would put Boot Camp/Windows on a partition of your internal drive. When you want to set up you Boot Camp partition, just follow the instructions of the Boot Camp Assistant. Do not format FAT under any conditions. You want to use NTFS.
_*Partition C: Everything else (Media etc)*_
Format: I don't know? I need this to be compatible with 10.6 and Windows.
I would not go this route. You do not want to use FAT. The best approach is to install MacDrive (mediafour.com) on you Windows system. If you do so then the 3rd partition can be Mac OS X extended (journaled), and both you Windows and OS X machines will be able to read and write the partition.
_*Other questions*_
a) Do I need to Erase first, re format, then create partition?
Using Disk Utility, create 1 partition with partition table GUID. After doing so, your partition should be formatted Mac OS X extended (journaled). If it isn't, then format (i.e., erase) it this way. Change your partition to 3 GUID. Selecting the sizes you want.
b) What is RAID?
Of no importance to you
c) Do I need to change something in Options? There's Master Boot - GUID - Apple Partition Map,
What do I choose?
See above
Help.

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Partition with Disk Utility?

I just got a 500gb external drive that I want to partition. Disk Utility is supposed to be able to do this. The help file says "Click Partition" in the Disk Utility window. I see nothing in the window with "Partition" on it. A screen shot I've seen (from LaCie's hard drive manual) shows five buttons across the top of the window: First Aid, Erase, Partition, Raid, Restore, but my Disk Utility only has 4 buttons. The "Partition" button is not there.
Any ideas what's up? This is crazy. What am I missing?
I've clicked on the external drive icon along the left column but nothing pertaining to partitioning shows up.

That is because you have your boot volume selected in the left hand column, select the Hard drive itself, the one with the Manufactory ID number. It should be at the very top.
Joe

Partitioning with disk utility

hi there.. i wonder, can i partition my primary hard drive with disk utility live? (i mean not from the leopard dvd on boot) i want to create a new partition that would be less than the amount of free space i have, while running leopard (my mac os shouldn't be damaged i think), is that possible? and safe? thanx

cukerko,
If you have an Intel Mac, the answer is yes. Intel Macs must have internal drives that use the GUID Partition Map, and these can be dynamically partitioned and re-sized under Leopard's Disk Utility.
It is relatively safe, but it is an action that modifies the drive at a low level. In other words, one would be foolish to attempt a re-partitioning or re-size without a good and current backup on hand. Provided you have such a backup, there's no reason not to create your partition.
Scott

I created a partition on my iMac drive. I have trashed the files that were in the partition but I can not trash the icon. I tried with Disk Utility. Any ideas?

I created a partition on my iMac drive. I have trashed the files that were in the partition but I can not trash the icon. I tried with Disk Utility. Any ideas?

If I understand correctly, the partition will still be on the disk and therefore mounted on the desktop. You would need to remove that partition to remove the icon.
Be careful if you try this, don't upset the main Macintosh HD partition or you may lose the OS and your files.
And always have a full tested backup of your system before modifing disk partitions.

Formatting partition (external WD portable HD) with disk utility takes days

For the past five days I've been trying to get my new WD Elements portable HD to work with my new MacBook Pro. I am using Disk Utility to partition the HD (being 1 TB in size). However, this process is taking 3 days now and nothing seems to happen.
The progress bar in disk utility seems to be stuck halfway but the program itself is still active. When I stop the process (by quitting disk utility) nothing happens. The program shuts down but the HD is nog longer visible in both Mac OSX Lion and in Windows. It is still there as disk utility does list it in the connected drives list - but it simply doesn't format it.
At first I thought it was the disk itself so I got a new HD (and sent the old one back) but that hasn't solved the problem.
Obvious question is: what's going wrong and how can I fix it?

D3Rk wrote:
I did ask WD and they said it the drive was not functioning well. That's why I returned it to the store and got a new one. Since the same thing is happening again, I'm thinking it's not the drive but something else.
I'm using the partition tab in disk utility (as recommend by WD) to format the existing partition into a Mac (Journaled) partition.
So you did not choose any of the security options.
Well, they said first one was bad, this one is doing exactly the same thing, so it sounds like this one is bad. Think I'd get a refund instead of an exchange if that's an option.
You can also try it on a different machine, Mac or PC and see if it works. If it's a Mac, I'd hope for a SL or L install instead of Lion.

I deleted my Boot Camp partition with Disk Utility and now I cannot reclaim the freespace?

I deleted my Boot Camp partition with Disk Utility and now I cannot reclaim the freespace?
And when I try to add a partition to the free space, and try to apply I do this:
I press apply and it does its thing for like a second, I switch tabs and I get this:
No matter how many times I reboot it doesn't work. Please help

diskutil list:
diskutil mergePartitions:

Difference between using bootcamp and building partitions with disk utility

hy everybody,
i successfully bought a mac (that was easy , installed windows 7 with bootcamp (quite easy) and now i 'd like to add linux also (considering ubuntu).
before i try to do it with bootcamp i'd like to know what the impact could be...
so i wonder; what does boot camp do and why shouldn't i do it manually with disk utility?
all inputs are welcome
cheers

Why not start by filling out hardware in your profile .sig as it makes a difference.

Problem Erasing external drive with Disk Utility

I've just purchased some Western Digital My Book Pro 1Tb firewire drives. They come pre-formatted for Windows. When I try to initialize them, Disk Utility returns a failed message & the drive then disappears from the desktop. It is still visible in Disk Utility. I can reformat as a FAT partition but not as a Mac partition. I tried connecting the drive to machine running Tiger and was able to format as a Mac partition. Is there a problem with Disk Utility in Leopard?

I have seen some behavior like this a few times before. When this happens I go to my Linux box and dd a bunch of zeros to the beginning of the drive, this will blow away any partition tables and such.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=100k
This writes 50MB of zeros to the raw device "sdb" (this may be different depending on your system)
I've tried to dd from MacOSX, but for whatever reason it's painfully slow.

Cant restore my macbook with Disk utility and my .dmg image

My macbook would not boot anymore. Stuck on gray screen with apple logo, spinning wheel and a loading bar for a while after shutting off.
I was able to get to Disk Utility in the recovery mode and, after a while, was able to make an image of my filesin an attempt to back them up.
The .dmg was put on an external and i checked it on my imac, i could open the .dmg file and browse all my files from my macbook, so those are safe!
After that i tried to wipe the SSD of my macbook and put the image back but that didn't work, also some resource is busy errors.
After trying this a few times without succes i figured i'd try to do a clean install. This worked.
My macbook air is working again but if Iuse Disk Utility in the recovery now and try and restore my image (.dmg file) it gives me Restore Failure; An error (-16) occured (resource busy) as well. I also tried to copy the dmg onto my macbook and run disc utility when booted into OSX. I open up the back up .dmg with Disk utility, then i go to my macbooks partition (Macontiosh HD) and use that as a destination and drag the mounted image as the source as shown on the image below. Am I doing something wrong here?
Doing this i get an error as well: (-119,930,878) Resource busy as you can see.
What can i do to get my image back on my macbook? Any 3rd party software?
I considered just transferring the files after opening the .dmg file but this works only for documents and not for programs and settings of the default apps.
I've looked all over the Internet and it seems more people have had this error but then with making the image, they also suggest unmounting the destination disk before trying to restore but my destination is Macintosh HD, i cant really unmount that can i?
Thanks in advance!

To make a clone, in the future you need to use a program like superduper or carbon copy cloner.
Either program makes an identical clone while preserving certain system files and marking/indicating to OS X that the clone is bootable.
Using Disk Utility to make a DMG was a good idea, but this will not yield a bootable image.
If Disk Utility could do a 1:1 copy of everything, then people would be using it to rip/duplicate DVDs.
But Disk Utility does not (it leaves out certain invisible/system files), hence it cannot duplicate/clone a hard drive or DVD.

So I may have messed up with disk utility.

So I was messing around with disk utility and was partitioning out some of my hard drive. I then accidently quit disk utility part of the way through. So now, part of it's partitioned out, but it wont show up. And since I can't find it, I can't get rid of it.

   Device Identifier:        disk0s2
   Device Node:              /dev/disk0s2
   Part of Whole:            disk0
   Device / Media Name:      OSX
   Volume Name:              OSX
   Escaped with Unicode:     OSX
   Mounted:                  Yes
   Mount Point:              /
   Escaped with Unicode:     /
   File System Personality: Journaled HFS+
   Type (Bundle):            hfs
   Name (User Visible):      Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
   Journal:                  Journal size 16384 KB at offset 0x53d000
   Owners:                   Enabled
   Partition Type:           Apple_HFS
   OS Can Be Installed:      Yes
   Media Type:               Generic
   Protocol:                 SATA
   SMART Status:             Verified
   Volume UUID:              8EEF101C-1386-3FC9-9B45-DD31DB2C472E
   Total Size:               179.2 GB (179186008064 Bytes) (exactly 349972672 512-Byte-Blocks)
   Volume Free Space:        41.1 GB (41091051520 Bytes) (exactly 80255960 512-Byte-Blocks)
   Device Block Size:        512 Bytes
   Read-Only Media:          No
   Read-Only Volume:         No
   Ejectable:                No
   Whole:                    No
   Internal:                 Yes
   Solid State:              Yes
andrews-macbook-pro:~ andrew$

Can't get rid of Windows on my Mac even with disk utility

I noticed this disk0r3 or something like that, and I know this is Windows.
I have a bit of a bug issuea nd the windows wasn't done very well. I wanted to erease it with disk utility, but it said it couldn't. What should I do?
I've tried the zero, 15, and 35 or whatever they offered.

Did you use Apple's Boot Camp utility to create a hard drive partition for Windows?
If so, do you want to erase the partition created for Windows or eliminate the 2nd partition and go back to a single hard drive partition?
If the latter, you have no choice but to reformat the hard drive first which erases the hard drive and then re-install OS X and all software.

RAID with Disk Utility question

I've setup a RAID array in disk utility for an external SATA NAS that I have. The Silicon Image Si3132 drivers are not working for Snow Leopard (the SATARAID 5 drivers) so I've installed the base non-raid drivers for 10.6.
I'm using Disk Utility to setup the RAID for now until I get updated drivers from SI. Here's my question:
Let's just say that my Mac Pro one day decides to die and I have to rebuild a new OS on the machine. I will then have this external drive where I've configured a software RAID with Mac OS X. Will I be able to rebuild this RAID and recover the data, or will I lose all of the data if the Mac needs to be rebuilt?
The external enclosure has its own controller, but these silicon image drivers do not seem to want to work as they are kernel panicking.
Will I be able to recover the RAID config with disk utility if I rebuild the machine? My thinking is NO

You have four internal hard drives; ability to boot from FW or USB, and I would include TimeMachine and clone (Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper). Some WHS NAS servers also support TimeMachine and SuperDuper, but I would have local backups. Two minimum.
I would not rely on SI or RAID.
And all you need to boot from, and I'd have at least two, is a basic 30GB partition for Mac OS: a working copy of your system as is, a copy of last version installed also, AND, one "emergency" boot partition for disk maintenance and repairs.
Then use NAS as second line of backup for your data, disk images, etc.

Problems with Disk Utility & Mounting DMG!! Help!!

Hey guys, im a fairly inexperienced mac user anyways I recently bought a IBOOK G3 with Tiger 10.4 and i'm having major issues with Disk Utility and installing applications.
The issues with D.I are that it loads up then I get the error message "Disk Utlity started but a background process needed in Disk Utility didn't start properly. Please quit and restart Disk Utility. And when I do restart it, i get the same error over and over.
Also my second problem is whenever I try to and install DMG files I get the error: "Broken Pipe" and sometimes "Device Not Configured"
I've tried searching for resolutions for each problem but they both involve the other functioning! I'm really at a loss, i've tried using programs like pacifist to reinstall my original files etc and they haven't seemed to help.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you xxx

Hi Kellie, and a warm welcome to the forums!
Could be many things, we should start with this...
"Try Disk Utility
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc that came with your computer, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
*Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.*
3. Click the First Aid tab.
4. Click the disclosure triangle to the left of the hard drive icon to display the names of your hard disk volumes and partitions.
5. Select your Mac OS X volume.
6. Click Repair. Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk."
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
Then Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, reboot when it completes.
The usual reason why updates fail or mess things up, is if Permissions are not fixed before & after every update, with a reboot... you may get a partial update when the installer finds it doesn't have Permissions to change one obscure little part of the OS, leaving you with a mix of OS versions.
Some people get away without Repairing Permissions for years, some for only days.
If Permissions are wrong before applying an update, you could get mixed OS versions, if Directory is the slightest messed up, who knows!
If many Permission are repaired, or any Directory errors are found, you may need to re-apply some the latest/biggest updates.
May even need to do an Archive and Install if you have room on the HD, but saves all your files and gives a new OS...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107120
I only use Software Update to see what is needed, then get them for real via...
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/
That way I can wait a week or so, check the forums for potential problems, and get Permissions & such in order before installing.
Report if there were errors please.

How do you setup RAID 10 with Disk Utility?

I read a post that indicated a Mac Pro user created two mirrors and then striped them with Disk Utility to create a RAID 10.
I tried this but Disk Utiity will not allow me to stripe the two mirrors. I tried dragging and using the "+" button. In each case no RAID 10 could be created.
Could someone list the exact procedure for creating a RAID 10 using Disk Utility?
Thank you

I have Mac OS X Build 8K1124 and I believe that came with my Mac Pro as I've not required a Mac OS X update via Software Update.
Now, I have to honest, I'm not entirely sure that was the exact process. As you can appreciate I don't have another 4 drives to try this again so I'll do my best here.
It's definitely right up until the part of making the mirrors and unmounting them, that I know for sure. What I don't remeber is what I had selected to get to the RAID tab to create the Stripe Set. I believe I had one of the mirror partitions selected, that is, either "disk5" or "disk6", which brought up the RAID tab that then allowed me to create the stripe set.
I then created the set and then dragged the mirrors (I believe disk5 and disk6) into the set.
If you can't do this can you let me know how your situation deviates?

Can Time Capsule hard drive be accessed with Disk Utility? I'm having issues...

How does one mount , inspect , verify , and possibly repair a Time Capsule hard drive with Disk Utility ?
My 500Gb 1st gen Time Capsule ( used wireless with Airport) has quit backing up new data . ( iMac Core2Duo, Snow Leopard) . TC says it needs 238 Gb of available space, but only has 35 Gb available. So it quit doing new incremental backup altogether. It's almost like it wants to start over.
Airport connection seems good. Time Capsule seems healthy enough ( for being 3.5 years old) . I really dont want to lose the data on the existing backup.
What is the nature of this glitch ?

I'm sorry , LaP , but " Time Capsule become too full " is not the cause of my problem .
In fact, I just got done pruning the iMac system hard drive a little to free up some 10 Gb of new space , yet created only maybe 1-2 Gb of new data to archive. The TC had been doing regular daily backups without issue and Time Machine was showing me stuff from about ten days back.
The TC informed me it needed 235 Gb of space but only had 34 Gb available. That 235 Gb needed is totally in error. My problem more resembles corrupt hard disk directories . Maybe Permissions ? which is why I asked about using Disk Utility.
Yes, I do need a newer larger TC, but pigs don't fly and money does not grow on trees to make tha happen. The backup I have now is fine and should work if I need to restore anything in the forseeable. New data will not be archived, alas.

Partitioning 1TB with Disk Utility

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