Repartition External FW Drive without Losing Data

I have an external firewire drive on which I originally created 2 partitions that now have data. The drive is attached to my Macbook. Is there a way to create a third partition, requiring resizing of the other partitions, without losing the current data ?? I don't think the current version of Drive Genius is intel Mac compatible. Disk Utility will erase the entire drive when creating a third partition.
I would appreciate any thoughts.

you're right, the current version of Drive Genius does not work with the Intel macs.

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How do I partition my external hard drive without losing data?

How do I partition my external hard drive without losing the data already on it? I've been using it with Time Machine on my old computer, but want to use it as a regular drag-and-drop type back up on my new computer. Is there any way to basically split the hard drive so I can still access the Time Machine backups on my old computer, but also be able to use it with my new mac? Thanks!

If you reformat the drive all data is lost.
The only way to save the data is to copy it somewhere else during the reformat.
Drag & drop will not backup things correctly.
I suggest you set up partition for each Mac and then point Time Machine to each of the partition for each of the Macs.

How do i reformat a case sensitive external hard drive without losing data

I know there are a lot of posts about this, and i have spent hours trying to find a soloution / understand what people have responded to others, but i can't work this out.
I also have a Buffalo HD (let's call it HD1) that stores my itunes library.
I have a WD My Passport for Mac (let's call it HD2) that backs up my Mac Book Pro.
I have an older WD that has older TM back ups on it from previous computers (let's call it HD3)
I have one spare completely 'clean' WD hard drive (let's call it HD4).
My laptop was really slow and full so i went to Genius bar, they sold me the Buffalo HD and they moved my itunes to it and set it up so it now has my itunes. I used this disk to run two TM Backups before i realised the drive was nearly full, so i bought the WD My Passport HD2.
I now use WD My Passprt HD2 for TM.
I want to MOVE the backups on HD1 to My Passport HD2 as there is lots of space on it. I also want to move my itunes library from HD2 as a back up.
But i can't!!!
After reading for hours, apparently this is because my HD1 is case sensitive, journaled. And it needs to be Journaled to work with TM/OSX or something very confusing. I have read lots of threads about re-formatting / partitioning and all things that are way over my head. But the one thing i do understand is if i reformat HD1, it erases the data.
This is NOT an option as it holds my WHOLE itunes. The Itunes is WAY too big to drag onto my mac book pro and then move it over to HD2 and make that my itunes folder.
HOW THE **** ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO BACK UP THE CASE SENSITIVE DRIVE BEFORE REFORMATTING IT IF IT'S TOO BIG TO FIT BACK ON YOUR COMPUTER? Surely that's the whole point of having an external drive... to back up AND give you more space?
I'm so mad that the apple store did this to me... they should know that case sensitve wouldn't work with a passport... that i would have problems. UGh.
I have options to move the files from HD1 as i have HD2 and HD3 and then also the completely unused HD4... but i can't move anything anywhere due to this case sensitive nightmare.
Someone PLEASE HELP ME.
thanks.

Hi Kappy,
Just wondering if you had any advice for my situation . . .
My time machine backup was backing up to a drive that was "Mac OS X Enteded Journaled, Case Sensitive." I had no idea what this meant, or that it would even cause issues.
I took my computer to the Apple store yesterday, and they wiped it clean. When they tried to restore it from the Time Machine backup drive, it would not work. Their guess is that Time Machine cannot restore from a drive that is "case sensitive."
Any thoughts on how I can convert my time machine backup data from a "case sensitive" state, to a "non-case sensitive" state? I've tried to just drag and drop the files from the case sensitive formatted drive to a new drive that I have that is formatted non case sensitive, but I get the following error message:
"The volume has the wrong case sensitivity for a backup"
I just really want my data back - I thought TimeMachine was the way to go (and was supposed to work) but unfortunately it is not.
Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,

If I donwload e-books from various e-book retailers and want to back them up on an external hard drive without losing the format, do I need a special hard drive?

If I download e-books from various e-book retailers and want to back them up on an external hard drive without losing the format, do I need to know anything special?

I just looked into this as I was moving my iPad to a new computer for synching. With no thanks to Kobo for any really useful information on their help site (this discussion was the most useful info I found), I think the following may address your issue with respect to Kobo.
1. There is not easy or official way to back up Kobo books from your iPad.
2. Kobo keep track of your personal library. Go to the Kobo website (Kobo.com) and sign in to your account. On the very top line is "My Library". That contains (or at least Kobo says it does) everything you have ever bought from Kobo. Kobo say that you may download any of this content to other devices you own at no charge.
3. I synched my iPad to the new computer. According to Apple, that will delete all my data as the apps are re-installed from the new compute. While all my apps got moved around from the order I previously had (many thanks Apple), all my books are still there together with my bookmarks etc. Looks like this did nothing to change any Kobo data.
While I do not like the idea that I cannot create a backup on my main computer, it is probably safer in the long run that there is a backup at Kobo. After all, I could lose all my equipment in a fire or something, and then personal backups would be of little use.

Partition ext hard drive without losing data

I have just bought my first MacBook. I have an external hard drive with data on backed up from a windows PC and from reading posts see that I cannot transfer files FROM my mac onto this drive as it is not formatted for use with a mac, although can transfer FROM the ext drive TO the mac.
Can I partition it to make a part for the mac and keep the other part for windows use WITHOUT losing any of the data already on there? I was hoping to use this drive to back up the mac using time machine.
Any replies appreciated in a simple form as I'm not that technical!
Thanks

Stress Test wrote:
On the fly formatting from NTFS to FAT32 is not possible without loosing data.
Not true. I have converted drives from FAT32 to NTFS, and vis versa, all while preserving the data on the drive. There is a number of ways to do it on a Windows machine. What I don't know is if there is the same software available for doing on a Mac. Since the OP mentions a WinPC, he might still have that capability himself. The one note of caution is that on an NTFS drive, you want to make sure that there are no individual files you want tot keep that are larger than FAT32 can support (4 GB). Here is one solution.

Is it possible to rename an external hard drive without losing links to my media?

Hello all. I am new to Apple and FCP, so I may be going about this all wrong. I have a new Mac Pro, OS X version 10.9.5, running FCPX version 10.1.3. I have copied all of my data from a 1T external hard drive to a new 4T external hard drive, but FCPX doesn't recognize my media files unless I rename the new drive to that of the old one. The problem is I want to continue using the old one. Is there an easy way to relink my files and keep the original name of the new drive?
Thanks.

douglas57 wrote:
I just spent 4 months editing a feature length documentary and I only understand about 10% of FCP. Only thing we can do is keep plugging away.
Good luck...
I've been using Final Cut Pro (pre-X) since v1.0 and I only ever used about 29% of the capabilities. However, most of the lesser functions slapped onto Ye Olde FCP were lame, unfinished, niche-focused or broken.

Reformatting External Hard Drive Without Losing Files

I recently switched from a crashed HP to a Macbook and am trying to reformat my external hard drive, but it looks like every option requires me to delete the files on my hard drive. Is there a way to avoid this? I'm a fitness instructor and ALL of my music is on the hard drive...
Thank you!!

Why are you reformatting the drive? Is it formatted in NTFS for Windows? If so, the Mac can read the files off the drive, which is what you'll need to do. Reformatting is a destructive process, so if you want the drive in a different format (such as Mac OS Extended) you will need to copy the files off to another location temporarily and then bring them back once the drive is reformatted. Since the Mac can read the old drive, an external drive formatted Mac OS Extended could be attached as well and the files moved over.
If you don't want to do that, there are some third party options that will allow the Mac to read and write NFTS drives. The downside is that it's more than a bit tricky to do, and the risk of things going wrong when writing is likely why Apple defaults to only reading the NFTS drives and not writing to them.
If you will need to use the drive on both Windows and Mac machines the one "common" format is FAT32. That has its own issues (including a hard and fast 4GB maximum file size) but either OS will read and write the drive without complaint.

Changing the size of partitions on external drive without losing data

Can this be done using Leopard ? I wanted to increase the size of the parttion for my MacBook Pro and reduce it for my daughter's MacBook partition on the external back up drive.

I am sure someone will have a bright idea, but you will lose data using Disk Utility:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306496
I think that the second volume is the one that has to be erased (the first one is expanding into its space). You can't increase the last partition.

Can Tiger be installed on a formatted drive without losing data?

i have a mac OS formatted drive with tons of data on it that i use as a secondary storage device. my main HD just burnt out, and i was thinking of installing Tiger to the secondary drive. i know that if you install OS X on a drive that already has a previous version of the OS on it, you have the option to 'archive and install,' but this is not an option since the drive has no OS files on it. so my question is, if i choose the standard option of 'install OS X' from the install disk, will i lose my data from the drive?

As long as the drive was initialized as HFS+ (Mac Extended) you can install OSX without erasing the disk, but if that disk contains your only copy of important data you would be living dangerously. If something goes wrong (user error, software bug, power surge, hardware failure, etc.) you could lose everything.

Adding more space on a partitioned drive without losing data

I have just partitioned my harddrive to put Windows XP on it ... but I underestimated how much space I needed. Is there any way to add more space on this partition with out losing any of the data on it? I tried using iPartition, but it's not free.
Any ideas?
Thanks

No. You can only manage a Boot Camp partition with Boot Camp Assistant. Unfortunately, Boot Camp Assistant does not have a facility for resizing a partition. You would first have to remove it, then repartition to the desired larger size. Of course everything will be lost on the partition. You can use a Windows backup utility to backup your files then restore them after you reinstall Windows on the larger partition.
If you were to use a utility like iPartition (and I don't know if it will re-size the Boot Camp partition) you may find that you can no longer remove the partition with Boot Camp.

Can you turn off iCloud Drive without losing data?

I enabled iCloud drive but then discovered through some articles that one should not enable iCloud Drive until Yosemite comes out and all of one's devices are running iOS8 and Yosemite on their computes. Since enabling iCloud Drive I am missing Photostream and Pages docs that I had on my phone and god knows what else. When I went to try and turn off iCloud Drive (so I can then wait until Yosemite comes out before I re-enable iCloud Drive), I get the following message:
"Are you sure you want to turn off iCloud Drive? Some changes have not been uploaded to iCloud. If you turn off iCloud Drive, these changes will be lost." Immediately below that message is a red message that says "Delete from iPhone."
What exactly would be deleted from my phone if I turn off iCloud Drive? What changes does the message refer to? Why can't I just return my phone from iCloud Drive to the regular Cloud so I can access my Photostream and my Pages data? And why on earth did Apple not alert us to the issues we would face with iOS8 if we install BEFORE Yosemite comes out? This is so frustrating!
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Teresa

I would love to hear that Apple has remedied this problem. From other discussion strings that I am following related to this issue, it seems thus far we remain out of luck. I did discover that if I log onto iCloud.com I can access my files that way. Still, what a pain.
When I got the message re iCloud Drive as I was setting up my phone after the update to iOS8, it said I wouldn't be able to access my files unless all of my devices were running iOS8 OR Yosemite. That message was misleading as it really should have said all devices need to be running iOS8 AND your mac needs to be running Yosemite, as it was not an "either or" situation. So frustrating...

Can you safely power off a Airport 5th generation and attached disk drive without risking data getting lost??

Can you safely power off a 5th generation AirPort and an attached disk drive without losing data?

I'd like to just be able to shut it down by tripping off the power strip the disk and airport are attached to with my toe so they're not sucking down power at night or when I'm at work. I wouldn't mind a sequence of power down the computers on the net first and then 'toeing off' the AirPort+disk.
I'm just wondering how quickly between the time that I power off the mac that the airport would flush all of its buffers.

How can i reformat my external hard drive without loosing any data?

how can i reformat my external hard drive without loosing any data?

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
It's impossible to format a hard drive without losing the data. One thing you can do before formatting is to copy the files from the external drive to your internal drive, and then, format the external drive. After formatting, copy the files to the external drive again, and everything will be as before formatting it

Since you can no longer backup to disk, how to restore from external drive without losing all ratings and playlists

since you can no longer backup to disk, how to restore from external drive without losing all ratings and playlists?

My own opinion is that you should install the later appropriate version of Silverkeeper. That said, I would in fact recommend if you can wait a few days for an answer, that you email the La Cie Silverkeeper backup team via the email link on the site at http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/
They are careful to say they are not officially providing a backup service, but when I emailed them with a query regarding usage about a year ago after downloading Silverkeeper for myself, I got a reply within a couple of days that cleared up my question.

Can I change partition size of external HD without losing Data

I have an external HD that I use one partition for backup and use another partition for Time Machine. I need to change the sizes, need more on my backup. Can I change partition size of external HD without losing Data? I just changed from a Powermac G4 using Leopard to a Macbook Pro with Lion, so I am also thinkin in getting everything set up, format the Time Machine with the old stuff and make a new Time Machine.

The Disk Utility can't change the starting point of a partition without erasing it and the data on it.
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Repartition External FW Drive without Losing Data

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