[bbales]

Has anyone here ever actually USED Drive Genius to repartition a disk? I have an external (80 GB) firewire drive that a couple years ago I repartitioned into 3 drives. That made a certain amount of sense at the time, but now I want to put all the three pieces back together again. On the surface, Drive Genius looked like a good idea, but now I'm not so sure. Despite reading the info and the help files, I'm still not sure how to go about removing the barriers. Do I delete a partition, resize it, whatever. The terminology is not the clearest. If I wanted to make partitions smaller, I could figure it out, but I'm pretty lost when it comes to just rejoining the three partitions.

Anyone ever done this? Any help out there? I hate to give up, just use disk utility to wipe out the drives (which was what I was trying to avoid) and then start over that way.

[Rainy Day]

Did you shrink the 80 Gb partition, or just reformat with smaller partitions? If the latter, you may not be able to get back to an 80 Gb partition without reformatting because the original partition size is often an upper limit on how large the partition may be expanded.

In any event, you should backup all the data on the disk, or have nothing on it you aren’t willing to lose, whenever doing any kind of partition editing.

[bbales]

I reformatted it with smaller partitions. I've already backed everything up, which makes me wonder why I'm going through all this brain damage anyway! I could just erase everything and start over...

On the other hand, I like software to work correctly. And without my killing myself first.

[cvbcvb]

I’ve used it to merge a 5 partition hard drive to 4. I believe I had to copy (onto another hard drive)then delete the files on the 5th partition. Using the “resize” command I then expanded the 4th partition to encompass all of the 5th. I then went about resizing all of the other partitions. It takes lots of time to do all this (by defragmenting and such) but Drive Genius has always come through (even their repair abilities are super). DG is great in my book.

CVB

[Rainy Day]

Apparently this is now a feature of the new diskutil tool with 10.4.6, at least on Intel Macs (but i don’t see why it wouldn’t be available on PPC Mac’s too), according to this article on Nondestructively Resizing Volumes.

[bbales]

Thanks for the info. I think they need to have step-by-step directions for how to do this (or maybe it's just me who needs them!) ie, first copy files (I figured that out on my own...) then delete, then resize. Directions are pretty unclear.

I will give this some time later this week when I have some time to play around. Thanks again.

[cvbcvb]

FYI, there is a 109 page DriveGeniusHelpFile.pdf. I accessed it under the Help - Show Help - menu.

It’s pretty thorough.

CVB