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Blackened Apple

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 15, 2012
116
0
Hey everyone,

I have an external 1 TB hard drive, half of which is filled up with a FAT-formatted partition and the other half is unallocated space. I wanted to create an HFS+ partition on that unallocated half, but I can't seem to do it using Disk Utility. The '+' that should be available is grayed out. How can I do this?

I want to have half of the disk of general purpose usage and the other half for Time Machine backups. Is this not possible?

Cheers
 

dba415

macrumors 6502a
Jun 18, 2011
903
1,084
Try extending your used space to fill up the entire drive, once that's done, try partitioning the space you need.
 

Blackened Apple

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 15, 2012
116
0
Hmm, I just noticed something. It says "You can't resize the partitions on this disk because it uses the Master Boot Record partition scheme." Has that got anything to do with me having formatted it under Windows? If so, is there any way to make it work properly without having to move all the data that's inside it?


Cheers
 

Tander

macrumors 6502a
Oct 21, 2011
676
1
Johannesburg, South Africa
I have one of my externals setup exactly like this. 1 for general purpose the other fro TM backups.

If the one side is unallocated - just go to the 'Erase' tab, select the partition that is unallocated and choose HFS format and click erase - should do the job.
 

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn
Feb 20, 2009
29,248
13,323
"It says "You can't resize the partitions on this disk because it uses the Master Boot Record partition scheme." Has that got anything to do with me having formatted it under Windows? If so, is there any way to make it work properly without having to move all the data that's inside it?"

My guess is, "no".

Your only option may be to:
1. Copy all the data on the drive to another source of storage
2. Re-intialize the drive using Disk Utility
3. Partition as required with Disk Utility
4. Re-copy your data back
 
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