disk utility: problem with resizing a partition

sweetpollypurebred wrote:
APM disks can boot a PPC only. In order to boot an intel it needs to be GUIDE.

not to contradict you but intel macs to boot fine from APM disks with no troubles.
I use it all the time for mac repairs
I have an external hdd partition into 3 1)for PPC Tiger, 2)for PPC intel tiger 3)for extras the drive it self is apm and boots fine on intel or ppc macs, aslo on intels it boots fine from usb as well which was a surprise to me i've heard of it but never tried

EDIT **disregard this others have answered faster than i did
🙂

Message was edited by: T Poulter

Ben,

Thanks for trying to help but I have answered all the questions you are asking twice now in previous replies except for which utility I used to format the drive (Disk Utility from Tiger) & if I have tried deleting both the 20 & 5 GB partitions (no). I am not going to try to do that & resizing the 66 GB (second) partition because that one contains my working Leopard install, also as previously mentioned.

As it stands now, I have to assume the problem is some sort of bug that shows up with an external drive, OS 9 drivers, & possibly other factors yet to be determined.

Hi RC,

No worries. I can only think that what was partitioned in tiger through DU possibly cannot be modified in Leopard.
All of my own partitioning was done with Leopard DU. I created two extra partitions on the fly from my already 50% filled 120Gb and removed the final two again leaving one 120Gb with no damage or corruption to my already existent data. If I think of anything else I will post it. Good luck trying to solve your issue. Sorry I couldnt resolve it for you.

Regards,
Ben.

rstankey wrote:
One interesting thing that I noticed is that when I go to the partition tab of my external drive in Disk Utility, it seems to think that +the drive is empty+, showing "Available space" to be 231.8 GB for a 232.8 GB partition. That seems a little odd…

That much I have finally figured out. The "Available space" you see in the popup is the +total available space+ on the partition less the overhead of the filesystem itself, not the +free space+ remaining unused by any files already on the partition. If you try to move the tab upwards in a partition with data files on it, you should discover that you can't move it up so far that there is not enough space for those files to fit on the reduced size of the partition. Disk Utility's Help explains this, but rather badly, IMO.

In fact, if you have a really small partition, say 5 GB, you will see a blue band at the top of the partition representing the space the filesystem overhead occupies. (On a large partition, it is too small to see.) By fiddling around with the size box & an "empty" partition, I have discovered that for APM schemes & HSF+ (Journaled) filesystems, the actual overhead is apparently about 680 MB, which the info popup rounds off to the total partition space less a GB for the overhead -- IOW, the "Available space" always shows up as 1 GB less than the partition size. (It may be different for other filesystems or partition schemes.)

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



-mj
macjack@gmail.com

APM disks are bootable.



-mj
macjack@gmail.com

Well, shut my mouth 😉



-mj
macjack@gmail.com

Are you sure the partition your trying to create is in HFS+ format? Check this please, or post a logfile from Disk Utility so we know exactly whats going on.

I'm getting this same problem. External drive, HFS+Journaled, Apple Partition Map.

According to Disk Utility Help, this should be possible.

i have seen a similar thing too! BTw, my partition map is GUID too, but I still can't 'drag the divider between them' and resize the partitions.

Hi Folks! I actually got the resizing to work the other day but tonight I can't get it to work again as I'm getting the same message as others. Tom

One way to think of it is you can't change a partition's "start" point, but you are now able to adjust its "end" point (size).

Oh, now I get it! Thanks! That makes sense.