How long should it take to partition a drive?

Question

How long should it take to partition a drive?

I am using the Boot Camp Assistant to partition one of the internal drives on my Mac and am wondering how long this should take and what will happen if I kill the process in the middle? The drive I'm trying to partition is a 1 TB drive, and I'm trying to partition about 300 GB for Windows. I started the process yesterday at about 2 PM. It had not stopped by 4:30 PM when I went home. This afternoon it is still running! Seems like there must be a problem, but I'm nervous about killing it.

Ideas?

2 x 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Mac, Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Posted on Aug 14, 2008 12:12 PM

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Answer 1

The hatter

Level 9

61,031 points

Aug 14, 2008 12:35 PM in response to Mark Fischer1

It should take less than two minutes. Kill it. It should be okay, but if not, well, DOA/RMA.

Even zeroing an entire drive should only take a couple hours.

It was formatted already? and default (GUID, Mac OS Extended).

Was anything on the drive beforehand?

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Answer 2

Aug 14, 2008 1:27 PM in response to The hatter

I killed it and it seems fine.

To answer your questions:
1) It was formatted when it arrived from Apple a few weeks ago.
2) There was nothing on it save for a couple of folders that are basically empty.
3) There may have once been something on the drive, but I'm not sure, as this is at a university in a lab setting, and my grad students may have put something on there and then deleted it.

Oh, I just had an idea (I think I'm just stupid here). I tried doing this when logged in as myself, not Root. I have administrator access on my account, but do I have to log in as Root to make the Partition?

Ultimately I'm trying to set aside about 300 GB for Windows and some scientific computing software that we use. We will sometimes boot directly into Windows, but other times use Fusion.

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Answer 3

The hatter

Level 9

61,031 points

Aug 14, 2008 2:07 PM in response to Mark Fischer1

I like to start off fresh, and just to be safe, reformat the drive from Partitions tab, set the table to GUID, create one new HFS+ partition.

Or, use the drive for Windows only as Master Boot Record in Disk Utility.

With MacFUSE you can even format MBR disk partitions as NTFS.

I suspect someone did something not by the book before you got to it.

I never run as root, just normal administrative account.

When I want to strip a drive of partitions, I turn to SoftRAID ( http://www.softraid.com ) and zero the first/last 100 sectors so it is back to being just RAW disk. Then format it in Disk Utility. Also, SoftRAID can be used to start zeroing a drive and cancel safely at any time.

With Vista, I format a RAW drive from Vista DVD without using BootCamp Assistant.

Anything more than a minute is too long. There is a bug in Disk Utility where sometimes I have to quit and relaunch for new partitions to show up in DU. Or where resizing partitions. And possible to "lost communication with device" error.

Also, 10.5.0 and 10.5.1 Disk Utility seems less reliable and stable than 10.5.3+.

And best to restart sometimes before using new or resized partitions.

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Answer 4

Sep 3, 2008 8:47 AM in response to The hatter

Sorry to be away so long. I have reformatted the drive into one new HFS+ partition as you suggested. Now I'm ready to do the bootcamp partition for Windows. My worry right now is this. If I make this partition larger than 32 GB, the Mac OS won't be able to write to it from within the Mac OS. I'm thinking this is going to create a problem if I want to not only boot to Windows, but also run VMFusion, which I do a lot. In the bootcamp installation guide it says that I "will not be able to save files to the Windows volume from Mac OSX" if I use and NTFS format for the partition. Is this going to create a problem for running Fusion, which, if I understand correctly, grabs its virtual image of Windows from the Windows partition I will create with bootcamp.

By the way, I plan on running XP, not Vista.

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