Partitioning your hard drive can help organize your data and make your life more convenient. But many users think it is an arduous task to partition hard drive, so in this tutorial, we will goes through the detailed steps of partitioning an empty external hard drive in Mac and PC. Partitioning External Hard Drive on Mac; Part 2. Hard drive partitioning is a common issue discussed in many tech forums. In a thread on Apple’s support forum, users complain that their Mac Disk Utility partition grayed-out while trying to partition their external hard drives. Probably, you just bought your external hard drive and are eager to use it on your Mac. To format an external hard drive for Mac with Time Machine, you must follow the steps below. Step 1 Open Finder, Applications, then go to Utilities and Disk Utility. Step 2 Follow the steps above to format the drive, and then you can use it with Time Machine on your Mac system.
Partitioning a disk divides it into individual sections, each of which acts as a separate volume.
However, with APFS, you shouldn’t partition your disk in most cases. Instead, create multiple APFS volumes within a single partition. With the flexible space management provided by APFS, you can even install another version of macOS on an APFS volume.
Important: If you’re partitioning your internal physical disk because you want to install Windows, use Boot Camp Assistant instead. Do not use Disk Utility to remove a partition that was created using Boot Camp Assistant. Instead, use Boot Camp Assistant to remove the partition from your Mac.
Add a partition
Important: As a precaution, it’s best to back up your data before creating new partitions on your device.
In the Disk Utility app on your Mac, select a volume in the sidebar, click the Partition button , then click Partition.
Internal storage devices appear below the Internal section in the sidebar. External devices appear below the External section in the sidebar.
When you select a volume that already has data on it, the pie chart shows a shaded area representing the amount of data on the volume and an unshaded area representing the amount of free space available for another volume. Microsoft video player for mac. Disk Utility also shows whether the volume can be removed or resized.
Note: If you see a small volume with an asterisk, the partition is smaller than can be represented at the correct scale in the chart.
Click the Add button .
Type a name for the volume in the Name field.
For MS-DOS (FAT) and ExFAT volumes, the maximum length for the volume name is 11 characters.
Click the Format pop-up menu, then choose a file system format.
Enter the size or drag the resize control to increase or decrease the size of the volume. Use xbox one controller on mac.
Click Apply, click Partition, then click Continue.
Click Show Details to view the step-by-step process of creating a new volume.
After the volumes are created, click Done.
After you partition a storage device, an icon for each volume appears in both the Disk Utility sidebar and the Finder sidebar.
Delete a partition
WARNING: When you delete a volume or partition, all the data on it is erased. Be sure to back up your data before you begin.
In the Disk Utility app on your Mac, select a volume in the sidebar, click the Partition button , then click Partition.
In the pie chart, click the partition you want to delete, then click the Delete button .
If the Delete button is dimmed, you can’t delete the selected partition.
Click Apply, then click Partition.
After the volume is deleted, click Done.
Erase a partition
In the Disk Utility app on your Mac, select the volume you want to erase in the sidebar.
Click the Erase button , then click Erase.
If the Erase button is dimmed, you can’t erase the selected volume.
After the volume is erased, click Done.
Enlarge a partition on a storage device
If you have multiple partitions on a device and one of them is running out of space, you may be able to enlarge it without losing any of the files on it.
To enlarge a volume, you must delete the volume that comes after it on the device, then move the end point of the volume you want to enlarge into the freed space. You can’t enlarge the last volume on a device.
How To Partition Hard Drive Windows 10
WARNING: When you delete a volume or partition, all the data on it is erased. Be sure to back up your data before you begin.
In the Disk Utility app on your Mac, select a volume in the sidebar, then click the Partition button .
In the pie chart, select the partition you want to delete, then click the Delete button .
Click Apply.
The partition is removed, reformatted, and all free space is assigned to the previous partition.
Click Done.
See alsoFile system formats available in Disk Utility on MacAdd, delete, or erase APFS volumes in Disk Utility on MacAbout Disk Utility on Mac
Nowadays many users are convenient in carrying their important data within external hard drive. However, most of the external hard drive users like to store their data in an organized manner. So in order to keep the data in systematized way you will have to partition the external hard drive. It has been noticed that many users does not even know that the external hard drive can be partitioned into logical volumes, so they stick with the only partition which is provided by the vendor.
How to partition external hard drive on Mac?
Unpartition Mac Hard Drive
The hard drive when purchased will at times come with some special drive management application within, which facilitates you to perform drive partitioning and other necessary actions. However, usage of this application is not recommended much but unless if the hard drive uses some exceptional multi disk RAID options. Nevertheless, Mac computer comes with the special application called as Disk utility, which is sufficient for managing the external drive.
Disk Utility is an inbuilt utility provided for Mac users which allows you to easily perform format, erase or resizing of partition, create partitions, setup RAID configuration and many other stuffs. Meanwhile, before making use or performing any activity with Disk Utility ensure that you have some prior knowledge about the configuration settings and other details because a single mistake can cause huge damage to your data.
Note: Before performing the below mentioned steps make sure there is no important data residing in your external hard drive because while partitioning the drive you will lose entire data from the drive.
Steps to partition external hard drive on Mac:
To setup the external hard drive for the first time, Connect the External hard drive to your Mac computer, open the Disk Utility and perform the following steps
Navigate through the following to open the Disk Utility
Application > Utility folder > Disk Utility
Select the external hard drive which you have connected to perform partitioning, this can be done by selecting the drive from the left hand side pane of disk utility
Click on the “Partition” tab from the main window
Select “Options” button, fix the partition scheme to GUID and click on “OK” button
Under “Volume Scheme” option select the number of partitions you desire to have
If the external hard drive is used only with the Mac based computers then make sure that you set Apple's Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) format under “Format” option
Subsequently provide information regarding “Name” and “Size” of the partition
Repeat the above two steps for the each partition if you are creating more than one partition; by this every partition will have name, format and size related information
And when you are sure about the information which you have provided then click on the “Apply” button and save the changes
Repartition Mac Hard Drive
After performing the above steps make sure everything is correct, test the drive and if it works correctly then your external hard drive is ready for use. However this operation is not simple in spite of much guidance, thus if you incorrectly perform the partitioning process then this may lead to huge loss of data. If you have come across such data loss then you can make use of Remo Recover (Mac) to recover your entire external hard drive data on all available Mac OS X versions. This application comes very user friendly in recovering any type of data from Mac hard disk in few steps. Moreover, you can make use of this application to recover photos from MacBook, MacBook Air, and etc.