[Ham-Mac] Why Partition vs. Erase a SATA hard drive?

[Steve Hellyer]

Hi Carl,

Sound advise on the partitioning vs erase and explained well!

But don't agree totally with the "limitations in how it can partition  
drives."

Check out man page for diskutil you can some things the GUI can't....
This is from 10.4 (Tiger).

man diskutil

Example....

Partition a disk
diskutil partitionDisk disk3 3 HFS+ Untitled 10G UFS UntitledUFS 10G  
MS-DOS DOS 10G

Cheers,

Steve


On 2-Aug-05, at 9:36 PM, Carl Makin wrote:

> Hi Dick,
>
> On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, Dick Kriss, AA5VU wrote:
>
>
>> Stay tuned for the response from SIIG regarding their manual that  
>> says to
>> use the Partition function.  I talked to an Apple tech who said he  
>> always
>> uses the Partition function for new drives but he could not  
>> remember why he
>> uses Partition vs. Erase.
>>
>
> Using the partition function rewrites the partition information to the
> disk and then formats the partition.  This would get around any  
> problems
> with the partition info possibly being corrupt, or incompatible (old
> version?).  The erase function just reformats the partition without
> rewriting or updating the partition information.
>
> If you were working with an old disks partitioned pre-MacOS X then it
> might be a good idea to use partition otherwise it shouldn't matter
> (Although it won't hurt).
>
> Be careful with the partition function though if you have an  
> external disk
> with existing partitions that you want to keep.  The Apple Disk  
> Utility
> has limitations in how it can partition drives.  For example I have a
> 120Gb disk partitioned as two 60Gb volumes, the first being DOS, the
> second HFS+.  Disk Utility wouldn't let me do that and I had to do  
> it on
> my FreeBSD box.  Once partitioned though, it works fine on the iMac.
>
>
> Carl.
>
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73
Steve - VA3SPH