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

John E Bastin jbastin at sssnet.com
Wed Aug 3 07:35:35 EDT 2005


On Aug 2, 2005, at 9:36 PM, Carl Makin wrote:

>
> 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.

I'm curious about your phrase "an external disk with existing  
partitions that you want to keep." How have you managed to partition  
an external disk?

I've used various external FireWire boxes, and they all work well  
except they are not supported in OS X for formatting. I always have  
to temporarily install the drive internally in my G4 to partition it,  
and then can take it out and put it in the external box to move files  
to it.

If you know of an external FireWire box with a chipset that supports  
all the Mac OS X initialization options, I'd like to know what it is.

Thanks a lot.

73,

John E Bastin, K8AJS
jbastin at sssnet.com
http://www.qsl.net/k8ajs/



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