Formatting Partitions in Mac OSX

martian_aphid · 4 Mar 2013 at 09:10

Hey guys,

I'm hoping one of you guys more experienced in OSX can give me some advice. I use Windows day to day but my sister uses Mac (however she still relies on me when she has a problem!)

Basically I had a 1TB external drive that I started using, I gave it 1 partition in Windows of approx half the drive as FAT32. Not long after that I gave the drive to my sister to be used with her Mac, the FAT32 parition worked fine for her barring the 4GB file limit but its now almost full. This is what she sees in Disk Utility:

I'd like to know if it possible to format the other half of the drive that shows up as "Free Space" with HFS, obviously it is vital to keep the remaining half of the drive and its contents intact. Can anyone give me a quick run down of how this can be done if it is possible.

If not I think I will resort to using Windows to format the rest of the drive with another FAT32 partition.

Thanks in advance for any help.

L33 · 4 Mar 2013 at 09:33

Click the + button just below the visual representation of the partitions

martian_aphid · 4 Mar 2013 at 09:42

Hi L33, I thought it might have something to do with that unfortunately with either block selected above the +/- icons are always greyed out and unselectable? Is it because the original formatting was done under windows and its somehow locked by that?

L33 · 4 Mar 2013 at 11:07

My mistake, possibly not if the drive is MBR mapped - may have to use a different partition manager. Something like a GParted boot cd would do the job

martian_aphid · 4 Mar 2013 at 13:23

Ah, I feared that might be the case :S

Thanks for the Gparted suggestion, I'll look into it later.

Thanks for your help ;-)