Partition Lacie drive without erasing exisiting data/memory

How is your Lacie drive formatted.

In Disk Utility, under Leopard, you should be able create a new partition without erasing the whole drive.

In the Partition Tab, first you resize the current partition to a smaller size by dragging the little hash marks in the bottom right corner to be smaller. then you hit the + sign to add a new partition.

But this can only work with certain format schemes (HFS+, etc).

My only advice is to be very careful. I wanted to partition my Lacie drive so that Time Machine would have its own volume. I believed everything I was told by disk utility (that no data would be erased) and went ahead - and lost it all. Thankfully what I lost was not critical to me, but nevertheless it was a real pain. I've no real idea what happened, and whether I did something I shouldn't have. But I don't think I did. I followed the instructions on screen, which were reassuring.

So - back up your data before you do anything.

Go to Utilities and open System profiler and there under hardware and firewire (in my case LaCie BakUp:
Capacity: 148.93 GB
Available: 148.82 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk3s6
Mount Point: /Volumes/LaCie BakUp)

This will tell you if your HFS formatted. Hope this helps

I've been sitting here staring at my Disk Utility and, maybe I need new glasses, but I just don't see a tab named "Partition".

Where exactly is the Partition tab, its early and it probably is staring right back at me but I just don't see it.

Thanks!

you have to select a disk, and not one of the volumes on the disk.

so if you look on the left side of the disk utility window, you will see something like:
"93.2 GB ST910021AS Media"
and then under that you will see: "Macintosh HD"

You need to select the first one to see the Partition Tab. If a Hard Disk has more than one partition, you will se multiple items under the top level.

Short answer: its a hierarchical menu and you need to be selected on the top level.

Roger:

Are you still having problems? I have been away for awhile.

Based on what you posted, you should be able to partition the drive. But since it is not working... After backing up the data on it, you may need to wipe the drive and start over. Make sure you erase the whole drive, not a volume on the drive. Basically click on the top level for the drive (on the left of disk util window), then goto the erase tab. In the Erase Tab, Choose Ma OS extended (Journaled), give it a name, then click on the Security Options button, and choose zero out data.

Once you have completely erased the drive, then try to partition it.

hope this helps.