Reformating a UFS partition to an OSX partition?

[britishnemesis]

Hi all,

I have two partitions on my hardrive at the moment. One is an OSX partition that I have called "Main" and the other is a UFS (Unix File System) partition that I have called "Storage".

Originally I had made the UFS partition because I thought it might work better with Samba when communicating with my Linux box. However this is not the case. Worse yet the UFS file system only permits files to have 32 character names and that is NOT good as I frequently need to use longer names than that.

So how can I convert this UFS partition to a Mac OSX partition? I know when I installed 10.3 it allowed me to setup my partitions and thats when I created it, but I really don't wanna reinstall OSX right now as I have a lot of information I need to keep.

Can the disk utility do this? I looked but I can't see a "Convert to Max OSX file system" utility anywhere.

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[Horrortaxi]

You ought to be able to do it in Disk Utility. It won't be labled as "convert to hfs" though. Just select that partition and tell it to initialize. Then you'll get the option of what file system you want to use. You probably know, but you will lose everything on that partition.

 

[robbieduncan]

You want to change the format of the partition to HFS+ (the real name of the Mac OS format). As far as I know the only way to change the format from UFS to HFS+ is to completely wipe the partition. Basically you have to back up all your data then use Disk Utility to reformat the partition.

 

[britishnemesis]

K I checked out the options in the disk utility but there is no where to remove the volume.

I go under the ERASE tab:
the only available volume format is UFS.

So I'm thinking if I hit that it will reformat the partition in the UFS format not the HFS+ format. How do you remove an entire partition? Maybe if I removed the entire partition I could make a new partition under HFS+?

 

[kgarner]

You could try booting off the install disks. Whent he installer comes up go to the menu and choose Open Disk Utility. I am not sure why it is only giving you the one option, but boting from the CD should bypass it.