Partitioning external hard drive problem?

I bought a new Seagate 120GB ATA/100 internal hard drive which I put into an Apricorn Firewire enclosure to create an External Hard Drive. The Mac initialized the drive and I used Disk Utility to partition the disk into 2 partitions, one for 70GB and the second for 50GB. When I clicked on "Partition", the Mac changed the size from 70GB to 55.9GB, essetially dividing the partitions equally, which is not what I wanted.
How do I correct this to get a 70GB and a 50GB external hard drive?
Thanks
Herschel

Rod,
Finally solved the mystery. Obviously, it would not be in the Help section, even though I had followed the directions exactly. Once I typed in the Size: 70GB, I then had to click on the left hand grey, partition box. At that moment, the box enlarged and the 70GB did not change in the Size window. How is one supposed to know to do all of that????
Anyway, it worked.
By the way, the Apricon Enclosures came and the setup was extremely easy. Took about 5 minutes and it was a Firewire External Drive. I got very good support, getting answers by email and phone in hours, not days. They are even sending me a cable that was missing. No Problem.
Now, I will work through the SuperDuper program. In corresponding with them, they suggested strongly that I Clone, and not Image the drive.
Thanks
Herschel

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I'm trying to create a new partition in disk utility in an external hard drive using disk utility and every time I click Apply it says that "Disk Utility has lost its connection with the Disk Management Tool and can't continue. Quit and relaunch Disk Utility". It is a 3TB hard disk and I already created the first partition of 2 TB, and when I click the + symbol to add a 1 TB partition and click Apply is when the error shows up. I have restart the mac, unplugged the hard disk but the error still shows up. Anyone has any idea??? Thanks for your help in advance
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I solved this issue. I was able to create the partition with the format MS-DOS and then I erased it to the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.
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Questions Re: Partitioning External Hard Drive

I need to free up some space on my MacBook Pro, but first I need to reorganize my external hard drive. It's presently divided into five partitions, as follows:
Mac - Mac OS (Extended Journaled) - 100 GB
Mac 2 - Mac OS (Extended Journaled) - 115.76 GB
Media - Mac OS Extended - 100 GB
Websites - Mac OS Extended - 50 GB
PC - MS-DOS (FAT) - 100 GB
I use the first two for cloning my hard drive, the next two for storing images, videos and websites, and the last one is reserved for files I copied from the PC I abandoned when I bought my Mac.
In fact, the last partition (PC) has about 80 GB available, so I'd like to take 75 GB and redistribute it. I'd like to wind up with something like this:
Mac - 100
Mac 2 - 145
Media - 150
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PC - 25
In other words, I want to add more capacity to the partitions Mac 2 and Media.
First question: Is there a way to shrink PC from 100 GB to 25 GB without erasing the data it contains, then expand Mac 2 and Media without destroying the data they contain?
If not, there's another possible solution. My last attempt to clone my hard drive failed, so I erased Mac 2; it's empty.
So could I reformat it as MS-DOS, resize it to 25 GB, then copy all my files from PC to Mac 2, then either reformat and enlarge PC or delete it and create a new partition?
When I open Disk Utilties and click on my external hard drive, I can then click on each partition and see its stats. But I don't see any way to resize any particular partition. At the top of the panel it says Volume Scheme, below which it lists Current, followed by other partition schemes (3, 4, 5, etc.). However, I assume that clicking any of these would erase all my data.
So can anyone suggest a way to reorganize my external hard drive without losing all my data?
Thanks.

All the commands remain grayed out when I click on various partitions. Maybe it's because I'm actually booted up on my external hard drive. I deleted several GB of files from my internal hard drive, but it still won't boot up. So it looks like I have a technical problem, and I'll have to visit my local Apple store. After I get it fixed, I'll take another look at re-partitioning my external hard drive.
Thanks.

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Just a couple things I tried this morning before I had to leave for work.
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Perhaps this is my error.
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thanks

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Batlo wrote:
(Time machine said it needed 29 GB for full backup and the drive had 32 GB free)
That's much too small for your backups. Time Machine usually needs 2-3 times the space of the data it's backing-up (see #1 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum).
I noticed that it had reached 2.3 GB and was not going any higher. I let it stay like that for about 5 minutes thinking that maybe it would start going again. No luck. I shut down time machine and saw a finder window with the progress bar behind it saying 2.3 GB.
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Report back with your findings for the *Partition Map Scheme* and Format of the drive (per #C1), and we can figure out what to do next.

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Running Mac OS X 10.4.11
This is the Leopard forum.
For future reference, the Tiger forum is here:
https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/mac_os_x_v10.4_tiger?categoryID=1 77

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I've looked in the forums and in the disk utility for definitions of these terms and am sorry if its there and I just don't see it.
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Choose Mac OS extended (Journaled) unless you have a specific reason to use another format.
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Hi, falcontech -
Welcome to Apple's Discussions -
Bad news, perhaps.
Your G5 is not OS 9 bootable; no G5 is.
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MacBook Pro 15-inch, Mid 2010
Processor 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB
Software OS X 10.9.5 (13F34)
I have an external hard drive:
2 TB Seagate Backup+Desk Media
Partitioned:
1TB - Windows NTFS
1TB - Mac (sorry I can't remember the formatting, whatever Mavricks asked me to use...)
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I was erasing 3 old backups from the Apple partition and my laptop crashed part way through emptying the trash. (it has done this many times before, where parts of the screen are frozen in square blocks displaced all over the screen. Screenshot not possible unless I use a separate camera).
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Since the Apple side of my laptop is my primary workhorse I really want to figure out how to fix my drive.
So Questions:
1. Anything else I can provide to the experts out there to help me get this fixed?
2. Can I custom fix this via accessing the drive on either of the Windows systems?
3. Why would it suddenly show up in Windows when it became unaccessible to Mac?
Thanks All!

UPDATE:
It has been maybe a month since this happened.
After I made this post and was checking emails, walking away from computer, and then came back my Mac partition of the External Drive has shown up on the Desktop...
So, in the ever immortal way of asking the tech to come check the issue and the issue resolving itself, perhaps I should posted on the forum sooner...
NOTE: The disk still shows up as unusable in the Disk Utility and it appears that the files are read only (cannot make a new folder on this side of the external drive)
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How do i partition external hard drive using mac

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Hi jwgoldsmith - welcome to the forum!
Are you sure that the external drive is formatted for Mac computers? It must be MAC OS EXTENDED, not FAT 32 or such. If you need to re-format, make sure you have saved important files to some other drive as re-formatting erases everything.

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I recently bought a new external hard drive (MyPassport) and I was advised to partition it in order to keep my movies/music files separate from the rest of my files. So I partitioned it, but now I can't figure out how to set up the Time Machine with 2 separate hard drives. Is there a way to set it up so that I can use Time Machine for both, one for movies/music and one for everything else?

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I have a 260GB NTFS external hard drive with about 100 gigs of info on it. I used it with my PC, running XP Pro.
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I do not need to be able to use this HD with my PC anymore. I'm 100% MAC now. I was hoping someone could give me some advice on how to make that happen. Do I have to reformat my HD? What system is that FAT32, NTFS? Something else? And how do I go about doing it?
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D-Power

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
You are correct, Macs can only write to FAT32, or Mac formatted hard drives with the built-in software, unless the Mac is networked to the PC, as this article describes:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=19652
You can also add Macfuse to the Mac, to connect to an NTFS drive, and that's linked here:
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
To reformat the drive, you'll have to erase it with Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility. Thus before you can reformat it, you'll have to copy over any essential information. The Partition section under Disk Uitlity lets you create a GUID Mac formatted partition under its Options button, and that is ideal for both Intel iMacs and MacBook Pros. If the label under the screen says Powerbook, let us know, and we'll direct you to that forum instead, if we can't answer your question here. Apple Partition Map on the other hand is the ideal for Powerbooks, and PowerPC based Macs. Formatting GUID or Apple Partition map, will let you boot from that drive, to verify that a clone backup was done properly depending on which Mac you made the clone for. Formatting FAT32 or NTFS won't let you make a full backup of your internal hard drive, and only will let you use it for backing up user documents. I highly recommend Shirt-pocket Superduper for backing up, as my FAQ* explains:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
P.S. The MacBook Pro is the Intel version of the Pro notebooks. You posted to the Intel iMac forum. The Intel iMac looks like: . So unless you have that Mac, you are in the wrong forum. There is no such Mac as the Powerbook Pro. You'll see the label in front says MacBook Pro below the screen if that's what you got. Here's the forum for it for category reference:
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=190
And pick a forum within it to post a new topic, if I can't answer your question here.
In addition, this nomenclature article will be helpful as well:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=503342&tstart=0
* Links to my pages may give me compensation.

Partitioning external hard drive problem?

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