Free & easy partition manager for OS X?

November 1, 2004 12:17 PM

Is there an easy (free) way to create partitions in Mac OS X without having to erase and create? I heard there is a way to do this via the command line, but my googling has not turned up a good result.
posted by thebwit to computers & internet (8 comments total)

FIPS for BSD Unix might exist for OS X, which is based on BSD.
posted by mecran01 at 2:16 PM on November 1, 2004

To the best of my knowledge, based on years of professional Mac tech support experience, there is no way to do this, neither with a GUI app nor from the command line. However, that does not mean that a BSD or Linux tool hasn't been ported to OS X without my knowledge.
posted by Mo Nickels at 2:16 PM on November 1, 2004

This might just do it: VolumeWorks. I've never used it, but the description says "Resize Partitions On-the-Fly allows you to modify partitions on your drive without erasing them" and "Partition Moving without requiring you to erase the volume."
posted by Mo Nickels at 2:20 PM on November 1, 2004

Not free but cheaper than VolumeWorks, try out iPartition.
posted by brettcar at 3:27 PM on November 1, 2004

Unless you have a real need for a filesystem besides HFS+ and have only one physical hard disk, there's no reason to partition under Mac OS X. Partition your disks correctly (i.e. one partition) when you initially set them up and odds are you'll never have to repartition them.
posted by kindall at 3:48 PM on November 1, 2004

"there's no reason to partition under Mac OS X"

False. Having a second boot partition makes running the occasional filesystem maintenance easier, since booting a Mac from CD or DVD takes forever -- 20 to 40 minutes. TechTool, Norton (yech!), and DiskWarrior will only run against partitions that aren't the boot volume, and fsck, even if run from single user mode against a read-only filesystem, doesn't take care of all possible problems.

iPartition claims to be able to do this, but the one time I tried it didn't work -- it, too, seems unable to resize the boot volume, and I didn't have a second boot volume to start from.

TechTool Pro 4's "eDrive" feature will create one additional 4 gig partition on the boot disk, but won't make more or use any other size. And it's really, really slow. It took 3 hours when I did it, on a not-at-all full disk.
posted by majick at 7:06 PM on November 1, 2004

Having a second boot partition makes running the occasional filesystem maintenance easier, since booting a Mac from CD or DVD takes forever -- 20 to 40 minutes.

It takes only a couple three minutes on a four-year-old G4. I can't imagine it taking an order of magnitude longer unless the machine was seriously broken.
posted by kindall at 9:47 PM on November 1, 2004

there's no reason to partition under Mac OS X

This is not true as I did have a reason. I ended up just backing everything up and doing a format and partition. A good reason to partition: Developer Copy of Tiger which work got for me.
posted by thebwit at 7:33 AM on November 2, 2004