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Partitioning external hard drive

This is honestly frustrating me. I want to partition some of my 1T Toshiba external hard drive for my XBOX 360. I have nothing on my hard drive right now. I went into disk utility and partitioned 85gb renaming it to be "XBOX". The other one was left Untitled. So I plug it into my 360 and it tells me it's unformatted. Makes no sense to me since there is literally nothing on it. So I format it. Shows up fine on my XBOX, but there's just way too much space dedicated to it. So I go to see why I couldn't just simply pick one of the partitions, it shows up as this now:User uploaded file


Am I not able to use my external hard drive for both my XBOX and my mac or something? I do have access to a PC computer. Can I partition it on there and still able to use the external hard drive on my mac to upload things to it?

Posted on Mar 5, 2017 12:22 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 5, 2017 5:40 PM

You can do what you want, but you don't know how. So, see these articles. Read before going further.


Disk Utility for Mac- Partition a physical disk using Disk Utility

Using macOS Sierra Disk Utility to Partition, Erase Drives

Disk Utility (El Capitan)- Partition a physical disk

User uploaded file

User uploaded file


Familiarize yourself with all of this. Now, let's go back to the beginning:


Drive Partition and Format


Restart the computer. At the chime press and hold down the Command and R keys to boot from the Recovery HD.

Open Disk Utility in the Utilities' folder.

After Disk Utility loads select the external drive (an out-dented entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the side list.

Click on the Erase tab in the Disk Utility toolbar. A panel should drop down.

In the drop down panel set the partition scheme to GUID. Set the Format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.)

Click on the Apply button and click on the Done button when it is activated.


Click on the Partition tab in the toolbar. You will see something like this:


User uploaded file


Click on the Add [+] button below the circle. This will create a second partition half the size of the disk. Not quite like the below, but you get the idea.




User uploaded file

You now select the partition you want, then move its sizing handle left or right as required to change the size of that partition sort of like what you see above. Be sure to put in a name before clicking on the Apply button so you will know which partition is which.


Select the small partition for your XBox. Set the Format to MS-DOS (FAT), put a Name in, and you will see something like this:


User uploaded file


Click on the Apply button. You now have an XBox partition formatted for DOS and one formatted for OS X.

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 5, 2017 5:40 PM in response to GamerNerdess

You can do what you want, but you don't know how. So, see these articles. Read before going further.


Disk Utility for Mac- Partition a physical disk using Disk Utility

Using macOS Sierra Disk Utility to Partition, Erase Drives

Disk Utility (El Capitan)- Partition a physical disk

User uploaded file

User uploaded file


Familiarize yourself with all of this. Now, let's go back to the beginning:


Drive Partition and Format


Restart the computer. At the chime press and hold down the Command and R keys to boot from the Recovery HD.

Open Disk Utility in the Utilities' folder.

After Disk Utility loads select the external drive (an out-dented entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the side list.

Click on the Erase tab in the Disk Utility toolbar. A panel should drop down.

In the drop down panel set the partition scheme to GUID. Set the Format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.)

Click on the Apply button and click on the Done button when it is activated.


Click on the Partition tab in the toolbar. You will see something like this:


User uploaded file


Click on the Add [+] button below the circle. This will create a second partition half the size of the disk. Not quite like the below, but you get the idea.




User uploaded file

You now select the partition you want, then move its sizing handle left or right as required to change the size of that partition sort of like what you see above. Be sure to put in a name before clicking on the Apply button so you will know which partition is which.


Select the small partition for your XBox. Set the Format to MS-DOS (FAT), put a Name in, and you will see something like this:


User uploaded file


Click on the Apply button. You now have an XBox partition formatted for DOS and one formatted for OS X.

Mar 5, 2017 5:45 PM in response to Kappy

I figured out a different way before I checked the replies on this, but your reply is very informative and I probably would have done it that way if I had checked this first. lol


The way I did it was to use the PC I have access to create two partitions one being compatible with the XBOX and one being the default. Then I went onto my mac and formatted the default one to get it to be OS Journalized. Yours would have saved me some time.

Partitioning external hard drive

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