Resizing a partition on a shared drive

Question

I have a hard drive connected to the server and the files on that hard drive are shared via AFP and SMB. I have also FTP share on that hard drive. Now I would like to resize that partition on the fly using such an application as iPartition. I want to have two partition on the hard drive. But when I try to use iPartition it does not seem to be able to resize the partition. Is it because the partition is locked in some way?

Answer 1

Gerrit DeWitt wrote:
Yes. Before you can resize that volume, you need to back it up and stop all file services that are accessing its contents. If the volume is on a disk that uses a GUID partition map, then you can use Disk Utility to repartition it on the fly (Mac OS X Server 10.5); or you can use *diskutil resizeVolume*. If the disk's partition map is Apple Partition Map (APM), then it is not designed to be resized. Other software may be able to accomplish that task, but I would certainly back up the data on the disk before trying!
Thank you for your answer. I actually found later what the problem was. The iPartition would not resize the volume because it was fragmented. I later read in the iPartition help that one has to defragment a volume before iPartioning it. So, I ran iDefrag on the volume and successfully partitioned it afterwards on the fly. I did turn off the services before that. It has been a few weeks since then and the server has been running smoothly.