disk utility: problem with resizing a partition

sweetpollypurebred wrote:
What is the partition map/table? System Preferences > Partition > Options > Select appropriate one.

I think you meant Disk Utility >> Choose uppermost icon, entire disk and choose partition tab.
Hover you mouse over for a few seconds for the Tool Tip.



-mj
macjack@gmail.com

{quote:title=MaplePub wrote:}
Actually, Leopard IS supposed to let you partition on the fly without reformatting. That is one of its touted features.

Well, I've been looking and can't find a way. Can you point me to a reference on how? All I've found is this support topic.

-mj

macjack wrote:
APM disks are bootable.



-mj
macjack@gmail.com

There is a caveat here:
IMPORTANT: While Intel-based Macintosh computers can boot from GPT and APM, Apple only supports booting Mac OS X on these machines from GPT. Apple's GUI tools, like the Installer, will prevent you installing Mac OS X for an Intel-based Mac on non-GPT disks.

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2006/tn2166.html

Also be very wary about using wikipedia for anything technical. Always use a reliable source and, if possible verify it.

Message was edited by: nerowolfe

Same problem here. Powerbook G4 1GHz with Apple Partition Scheme, HFS+ volumes.
I posted a bug report on Apple Bug Reporter ( https://bugreport.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/RadarWeb.woa/wa/signIn). I think that it would help if you can do the same.

Simone

macjack wrote:

{quote:title=MaplePub wrote:}
Actually, Leopard IS supposed to let you partition on the fly without reformatting. That is one of its touted features.

Well, I've been looking and can't find a way. Can you point me to a reference on how? All I've found is this support topic.

Disk Utility has a very limited ability to resize partitions. You can split a partition, or merge two partitions that happen to be consecutive, and I think that's about it. You can't make one partition larger at the expense of making another smaller. Disk Utility's online help has a little more than that support topic.

nerowolfe wrote:
IMPORTANT: While Intel-based Macintosh computers can boot from GPT and APM, Apple only supports booting Mac OS X on these machines from GPT. Apple's GUI tools, like the Installer, will prevent you installing Mac OS X for an Intel-based Mac on non-GPT disks.

That was true for Tiger (because there were no "universal" installs for that OS version), but it is not true for Leopard. See Mac OS X 10.5: Creating and maintaining a bootable "universal" external disk for the details, but the bottom line is the APM partition scheme supports booting both PPC Macs & Intel Macs from Leopard, assuming of course that the Macs can run Leopard.

What is the partition map/table? System Preferences > Partition > Options > Select appropriate one. I have found that the master boot record prevents repartitoning/multiple partitions. If you plan on usining this with PPC as well as Macintel computers choose the Apple partition map and if you need a boot-able HDD for the Macbook choose GUIDE.

Sweet Polly

Yes. Disk Utility. Sorry. But I meant to select the option button at the bottom center of the partition sheet. A drop down sheet appears with three choices. My situation was that even though the partition format indicated HFS+ it was not as Master Boot Record was the partition scheme.

Thanks,
Sweet Polly

+macjack wrote:+
+You can't use disk utility to re-size a partition "on the fly". You need to erase the entire disk to re-format.+

Actually, Leopard IS supposed to let you partition on the fly without reformatting. That is one of its touted features.

APM disks can boot a PPC only. In order to boot an intel it needs to be GUIDE. The drawback of this is that it can only be accessed from a PPC through IP over FireWire (networked) and not as an external or Target Disk Mode as a PPC will produce an error warning that there are no volumes it can read.

I was able to get around this by formatting twice. Once to make it an Apple Partition Map (volumes current) and the second time to actually partition the HDD into volumes/sizes. It was always reverting to Master Boot when I tried to format and partition the volumes in one shot as whenever I changed or split the volume after selecting APM I found it had reverted back to Master when I went back to Options to check. I got the same error DU says it Apple Partition Map but the options sheet still says MBR. They start at different points of the disk and this is causing this error.

If you are trying to resize an existing volume without erasing it you would have to use a third party utility.

Sweet Polly

Actually I just got this to work, though I'm not sure how.

I had ended up erasing the 2nd partition which is the one I was wanting to resize bigger. Maybe that made the difference.

Also I noticed at one point that one of the partitions on the drive had Owners Enabled:Yes marked. Now they both say "No" so perhaps that was the problem as well. (Is this the setting indicated by "Ignore Ownership..." in the Get Info window?)

Well I had some more success and failure.

Originally I had 3 partitions. I deleted the 3rd and as stated above and eventually was able to enlarge the 2nd partition to fill the remaining space.

I attempted to split the 1st partition which was 230GB full, 8 GB empty. By default, it split the partition into two equal halves. According to the Help it should have created the first partition according to the size used, so 230/8. I didn't want to experiment so I didn't try to apply. (Actually I may have tried it at one point and it gave the not supported error.)

At this point I deleted the 2nd partition and tried to enlarge the 1st to be a single partition covering the whole drive. I got the usual error. I then tried to add back the 2nd partition and Disk Utility hung on "Modifying partition map". I let it go for 1/2 hour and then quite Disk Utility which warned me the disk would be messed up. When I relaunched the second partition wasn't valid, but I was able to format it successfully. I chalk up this error to Firewire problems more than a fault with Disk Utility.

Anyway, at this point I reformatted the whole drive with GUID partition scheme. I was then able to manipulate the partitions as advertised. Splitting, removing, enlarging, etc. Of course there was no data on the drive, but it appeared to only erase the correct volumes. Also of note, the original Apple Partition Formatting had OS 9 drivers installed, after switching to GUID it did not (I didn't even see that option when making it GUID).

So, long story short, I'm guessing the new live resizing might only work with GUID. Or maybe it just had an easier time since the drive is now empty. (I'm on an Intel iMac).

Same problem for me as I made the leap from 10.3.9 to Leopard. In summary, the external drive is in Apple Partition Mapping (APM) and the resizing only "works" on GUID formatted drives which came in with 10.4.

So my questions are:

- is there a way around this? For instance is a Disk Utility (GUI) limitation and the underlying diskutil from the command line would work. Is there a dsikutil command to change the partition from APM to GUID without erasing the data?

- Do I just need to bite the bullet and shuffle the data around and repartition the external hard drive?

wojtimosi wrote:
while trying to resize partition on my external drive with disk utility I get a message:

Partition failed with the error:
Filesystem resize support required, such as HFS+ with Journaling enabled

Disk format is Mac OS Extended (Journaled) - isn`t it HFS+? Then, what am I doing wrong? It is important to me not to lose my data

I have the same problem. My external drive is formatted with HFS+ Journaled and when I try to split it into two partitions, I get the above error. My partition map is APM, not sure if that has anything to do with it.