6831 One of the more significant unheralded new features in OS X 10.5 Leopard is the ability to create new hard drive partitions or to expand or shrink existing ones without erasing the entire drive. There are a number of third-party applications that can do this as well, but it's never been a function built into the Mac OS before.

Provided there is open, unwritten space left on your hard drive, you can add a new partition by opening Disk Utility (in the Utilities Folder in your Applications Folder), click on the hard drive's name in the left column, click the Partition tab and then the + button, and drag the horizontal dividers in the Volume Scheme map to configure the size or sizes of respective partitions. Once you are satisfied with the partition proportions, name your new partition, click "Apply" and you're done.

(This screenshot reveals, among other things, that I need a larger-capacity hard drive, or to upgrade to a newer Mac with one! )

If you want to remove a partition, thereby merging two adjascent partitions, click on the partition you want to eliminate (that would be the one immediately below the one you want to expand) in the Volume Scheme map, and then click the - button. Note well, however, that everything on the partition that is being eliminated will be erased in this action.

You can also shrink an existing partition, provided there is unused space available, by dragging its bottommost horizontal divider upwards in the Volume Scheme map.

Hint: you can in most instances achieve a lot more flexibility in resizing or creating new partitions by running a disk defragmentation/optimization using a third-party utility AlSoft's DiskWarrior or ProSoft's Drive Genius, the latter of which also incorporates a full-featured disk reformatting function


Charles W. Moore

Tags: Blogs ï OSX Odyssey ï Hot Topics ï

Login † or † Register † †