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Can you partition a drive without erasing data?

How can I increase the size of a partition on an Seagate 250GB External drive (Usb 2) with data already on it?

  • I own a SEAGATE 250 GB EXTERNAL DRIVE USB 2.0 http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000ES4YBO/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller= The drive originally came formatted in FAT32 (With 232.4 GB available storage) I have previously partitioned this external drive into two sections. One partition to: 212 GB and the remaining: 20.4 GB. After doing this, I formatted the larger partition (212 GB) to NTFS but kept the smaller partition (20.4 GB) in FAT32. I have stored many files and music in both of these partitions that I definitely need to keep. I have just bought an Apple Mac and would like to extend the size of the FAT32 partition (and as a result reduce the size of the NTFS partition) - as I understand Macs are compatible with FAT32. Is it possible to do this (change the size of the partitions) without having to reformat the drives and therefore not lose all the data currently stored on the drives? Thanks in advance.

  • Answer:

    If you just bought a Mac, if it's new anyway, it should have Leopard, OS X 10.5.x on it. The app "Disk Utility" that comes with Leopard should be able to repartition the drive without losing any Data. I say "should" because, even though that would save a lot of time, I would still want a Backup of both volumes before I turned "Disk Utility" loose on the repartition. Hope this helps. •

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Other answers

you have to format and set it up in there. save the data to another device before.

Shaun H

Well it sounds like to me you just need a decent partition manager -- Partition Magic is OK - but its just OK... Acronis is supposed to be the best - but I think either one will do this for you in about 5 seconds Enjoy the mac !

TEX4S

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