How do I partition my mac drive?

balster

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I just bought an iBook with 15 GB i'd like to partition the drive, how do i do this? When I open the drive manager (os x) everything is grey, becoude the os is installed on the drive. Please help?
 
boot from the system 9cd that came with your computer "put in cd, reboot and hold down the c-key"
and then use the diskutility to partition your drive:)
note:you clear everything that is on the drive so you need to reinstall osX,os9 afterwards.
 
ok, so let me see if I understand this correctly;

- I use the OS 9 cd and hold down c and partition the drive
- I reboot and install OS X

Is this correct?
 
If you partition your drive, you will have to reinstall your system. So, if you want to partition and reinstall OS X, follow these steps...

1) BACKUP all your pertient files.
2) Reboot from the OS 9 install CD.
3) Run DiskSetup. Choose the # of partitions you want. Click Initialize. After you do this, your drive will be erased and repartitioned.
4) Restart, and reboot with OS X CD. Hold down C, and reintall OS X.

It's a pain to do, but currently I do not know of any means to repartition without wiping out current HD info.
 
Hi,

I have a rather subtle question. With FAT, FAT32, and ext2 (linux), it is possible, though RISKY and NOT ADVISED IF YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, to repartition manually, without disk partition software, without losing existsing data. Here's how.

First, use a disk optimization utility. This will ensure that the file allocation tables don't refer to places on the disk past a certain sector, and insure that files do not have parts past a certain sector. Suppose that your files all fit into the first 2 gigs of your drive.

After doing this, use a really low-level partition utility, like fdisk for linux, to delete all existing partitions. Now, for your original drive, partition from 0 sector to past the 2gig sector, with whatever partition file system ID was originally on that drive. Then, partition the rest of the disk however you like! Voila! Note that you may have to manually reconfigure that drive's boot sector. Learn lilo ;)

My question: is this possible on HFS+? If not, a technical answer why not would be greatly appreciated.

-ZeroAltitude
 
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