quick,simple tool Apple desperately needs

[zuppasch]

Apple needs to add a feature to "Disk Utility". This should be easy for them to implement.

Presently OS X users can not dynamically re-size disk partitions ( and add other partitions ) with Apple's Disk Utility. Even an extremely simple implementation of this concept would be of great assistance.

For instance, one that simply took a user-specified amount of empty disk space, at the end of the last partition, and dynamically converted that into a new partition unto itself.

This should be simple for Apple to provide us and would aleveiate the problem of archiving an entire disk, simply for the purpose of repartitioning it.

I hope to see this in PANTHER.

 

[mr. k]

Something tell's me this isn't particularly easy to do. It's not implemented to my (limited) knowledge, in any modern OS. I don't know why, and if it could be done I agree it would be useful, but alas, I could use a few billion dollars right about now too ;^)
And I doubt that if it ever appears, that it will appear in Panther. Many beta-testers have leaked just about every Panther feature, and if this was one of them it would have gotten a significant amount of rumor press.

 

[fryke]

yes. it's certainly no part of panther. there are third party tools that can achieve this, but i never had a good feeling about resizing partitions with them... it still _is_ the best to have a backup harddisk...

 

[Racer D]

it can make your whole disk useless, so it is not very safe to use it, and apple is aware of it

 

[Pengu]

Here's a good reason not to do it:
At TAFE, as part of a web based assessment system i made, we wanted to test it on a Novell server in the classroom before tryna get it to work on the live server. MySQL needs an NSS formatted volume though, so we had to "shrink" one of the partitions from 2gig to 1gig. it happened to be the DOS boot volume for the server. We shrunk it. it mounted in dos. we could look at it. try to boot the server and it would have a cry. We ended up copying everything from the DOS partition to the newly created partition, and then formatting it with the /s switch (to make copy system files, ie: command.com, etc) before copying all the files back. It wasnt a fun experience. we used PQMagic to resize the partition with btw..

 

[Jason]

partition magic on pcs has always worked wonderfully for me.. i would love to see something like that on mac

 

[Krevinek]

It *is* possible, but it also requires that your app knows of the information the filesystem needs on the resized partition, and a defrag ability.

The trick is to defrag everything into the size the partition will become before resizing. Then with the extra space, create a new partition. I am not sure, but some filesystems go puke when you resize the partition... because their version of an allocation table becomes invalid. So the filesystem information would have to be updated or rebuilt as well.

While possible, it is a very touchy process for an effect that a small group will use. Partitioning isn't exactly a heavily used ability in the market Apple wants to impress right now, let alone the need to do it after using the drive for awhile.

 

[mr. k]

Yeah, I guess I just don't know what I'm talking about! Sorry...
<hit's himself a few times>
Again, sorry...

 

[Ripcord]

I managed to kill my entire disk on my Windows laptop the other day while trying to resize it with Partition Magic to make room for Linux... Way to go! And way to go me for not backing several things up!

 

[Arden]

I think the reason it's a bad idea is that you've got data all over the drive when you use it, and it's difficult to separate the blank space from the used space to reallocate it to another volume. Defragging would probably help, but it would still have a problem because it can't just make a clean separation and say, "These blocks go to this volume and those go to that volume" because data is scattered across the drive.

 

[Krevinek]

Originally posted by arden
I think the reason it's a bad idea is that you've got data all over the drive when you use it, and it's difficult to separate the blank space from the used space to reallocate it to another volume. Defragging would probably help, but it would still have a problem because it can't just make a clean separation and say, "These blocks go to this volume and those go to that volume" because data is scattered across the drive.

Actually, you can make a clean seperation, but if your existing data exceeds your new partition size, your screwed.