5 Tips for Quick and Safe Mac Partitioning

Mac facilitates partitioning a hard drive using Disk Utility (found in Applications-> Utility folder) that is a full-fledged built-in disk management tool. Unlike Windows users, Mac people have this advantageous feature in their excellent operating system that allows creating and modifying a partition easily with much less effort and minimum of fuss. Though Mac partitioning is not a hard task, users often notify that they are facing problems and meeting errors while doing this. Therefore, in order to help you quickly and safely partition a Mac drive, this article is going to discuss a few valuable tips.

Before we start partitioning, launch Disk Utility (found in Applications-> Utility folder) and select the source hard drive (not a volume) in the left pane. Generally, hard drives are named as the manufacturer’s name, such as Seagate, Hitachi etc.

Tip 1: Please make sure that you have selected the right hard drive in case multiple drives are attached.

Now, click Partition tab in the right pane that displays the graphical orientation of the selected hard drive in the Partition Layout field. As you can see, it shows complete hard drive as a single partition that is partially colored blue (Blue colored area denotes the hard drive portion containing data, but not its exact location.)

Tip 2: Drag this partition up by clicking and holding the bottom-right corner (where three gray lines are shown) of the graphical structure in order to resize it. Do not click plus (+) button given below to start Mac partitioning before resizing.

After you resize the hard drive, click plus (+) button to create a new partition. This newly created partition acquires overall free space available.

Tip 3: Make sure you have resized (set dimensions) every newly created partition before creating another.

You can resize a partition by clicking it and specify a ‘Name’, choose a ‘Format’, and type the required ‘Size’ in the Partition Information field.

Tip 4: Choose a format i.e. Mac OS Extended (Journaled) if you want to use it with Mac Time Machine or as a boot volume or Select Mac OS Extended (No Journaling) if it is for Mac media or for data storage.

Once you are done, before you click Apply to save the changes, click Options button below the graphical structure of the hard drive and choose a Partition Map Scheme out of three i.e. ‘Apple Partition Map’, ‘Master Boot Record’, and ‘GUID Partition Table’.

Tip 5: Choose “GUID Partition Table” from the opening window for every individual partition in order to make it resizable.