Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Soft partitioning
- Thread starter Tyr
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
a soft partition would allow me to break up my HD into smaller chunks (same as partitioning would) except i wouldn't have to wipe my current drive to do it. It would allow me to open a program and say, "hey i want to reallocate 30 gigs to be seen as another Hard Drive", the way you do it through Disk Utility requires you to erase your hard drive before you can partition it.
As far as I know, there's no way to partition your hard drive without wiping it...and even if there was, I think it would cause a lot of problems. A possible solution may be to create a RAM disk (here's one possible program) which uses part of your RAM as a "hard disk," but information stored there is lost after restarting.
These guys claim to have a solution, but it's not freeware, it's $44.95.Whyren said:
http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php
B
If you're not planning to boot from it, you can just make a large disk image. Why do you need another partition?
Depends on why you want to do this, but can't you use Disk Utilitiy to create a 30 G DMG file for you that will then be seen as a separate drive when mounted?Tyr said:
Kind of the way that several older try linux on windows distros did. They created a ext2fs disk image on your FAT32 drive which became your root partition when booted into linux. Also the same way you can mount ISO images and have them be seen as a virtual CD.
Of course the why comes in, since you probably can't use this method if you want to use the ew partiiton to boot an alternative OS. And you would probably take a slight performance hit vs. a real partition. But if all you want is to segregate some data into a sandbox, it should work...
EDIT: Heb, you beat me to it and much more succinctly.
B