Yeah, I thought of that. However, when I tried to boot from my Puppy LInux CD, the touch pad would not move the mouse pointer around, so I had no way to navigate and thus couldn't open up GParted.
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How Can I Non-Destructively Resize Partitions in OS X Leopard
I have a 500 Gb Western Digital external drive that I use to back up my MacBook. Originally I partitioned it in 4 parts and used the 1st partition (which was only 80G) to back up my MacBook using Time Machine.
Now I have decided that I would like to have just 2 partition of 250 Gb each rather than 4 partitions. So I used Disk Utility to erase partitions 2, 3 & 4. Now I am left w/ just one partition, but it is still in its original size (80 gigs). I see no way in Disk Utility to increase to size to 250 nor any way to add a 2nd partition WITHOUT having to destroy all partitions and start over.
I need to retain the data on that 1st partition, so destructive repartitioning is not an option for me.
How can I do this??
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Answers
Take a look at this link. http://www.macworld.com/ar
You should be able to do what you want to do using the OS X command diskutil from a terminal window. I have a Mac Mini that is running Snow Leopard that is a test machine for me. I went and executed the commands in the article and was able to, on the fly, resize my only partition from 80 GB to 50 without issue. I then rebooted and reran the commands to resize the disk back to 80 GB; also without issue. I did NOT attempt to create a second partition, but since everything else worked OK, would assume that part of the command would also work fine.
Caveat: Make sure that you have all of your data backed up; no command or utility that messes with the partition is ever perfect.
Second Caveat: read the entire article and make sure that you understand how to get the results that you want.
And unfortunately I don't have an answer for that. I don't have a PPC Mac in my environment to test on.
I suppose you could use the DiskUtility app to create a second partition and put some data in it and then use the article I linked to to play around with the second partition. If that works OK, then it should work on your production partition/data.
But, as I said, I don't have any way to test this myself.
OK. I'm trying this out on a different external drive for testing purposes.
This was the output of diskutil list:
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *37.3 Gi disk1
1: Apple_HFS Ext 37.3 Gi disk1s1
But when I type in "diskutil resizeVolume disk1s1 30G" I got an "Error resizing volume" message.
I also tried "diskutil resizeVolume disk1s1 30G JHFS+ Ext" I get the following error message:
There do not appear to be enough arguments for the partitions you specified
Can you see what I'm doing wrong?
I think it's also OK to use the disk1s1 like you did, but I know that when I tested mine I used the name of the disk which was "Macintosh HD" and it worked. If what you tried doesn't work and if what I am suggesting doesn't work, you may have your answer about doing the process that I linked to on a PPC.
My guess is that it's either because it's a PPC or, perhaps more likely, because of the partition scheme of the disk itself. You could put the real external disk back on and do the list and see if the disk format is different. If it is, you could perhaps change the format of the test disk and try again. My local disk on my Mini says that it's a GUID_paritition_scheme, while your's says Fdisk. This may be the issue.
You are probably correct that the problem lies w/ the partition scheme. I'm surprised that it shows as an FDisk_partition_scheme b/c before I plugged in the drive I had used GParted on my PC to wipe out the previous FAT32 format, so in theory it was a virgin drive. And then when I first plugged it into the PB it offered to initialize it, which should have been done in HFS+ format. When I go into the Finder now and click Command-I, it does show up as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Odd.
jhyiesla, sorry for the long delay since my last post. Yeah, it seems like the problem lies w/ the FDisk_partition_scheme. I had the same exact problem on another external that originally came formatted as FAT32. So it appears that this command does not work w/ any drive that has any traces of FAT32 on it.
Seems that if the Mac Disk Utility is used to completely format the drive as Mac OS Extended file system then this command works fine. Perhaps there is a work-around for this, but I don't know what that would be?
Thanks for all your help!
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by: AsafBrukarzPosted on 2009-10-13 at 23:19:14ID: 25567725
Most of the Linux based LiveCD used a program called GParted that can resize the partition for you without destroying any data.
Look at: http://gparted.sourceforge
You simply download the .ISO file, burn to a CD. Boot the computer from the CD and the system will automatically start into X Windows with GParted running.
As always though, you should back up in case something goes wrong.