how to partition 1tb external hard drive for windows and mac time machine

Partition 1Tb External Hard Drive For Windows And Time Hine Mac OS X 10

The drive is selected in the left column, and I clicked on the Partition tab.

But with all that new storage space it might make sense to partition the hard drive.

When you partition, you are dividing the hard drives storage space into sections.

For example, you can partition a 1TB hard drive into two 500GB sections.

Each section would appear on your Macs desktop like a single hard drive would.

You can create a partition that stores just the documents you create, or dedicate a partition to storing your iTunes media.

This tutorial goes through the steps of partitioning an empty external hard drive using Disk Utility, which comes with every Mac.

Partition 1Tb External Hard Drive For Windows And Time Hine Mac OS X 10

The steps here are using Mac OS X 10.6.7 and should be similar for older OS versions.

We have a separate tutorial on how to partition the startup drive while its being used to boot your Mac.

That tutorial can also be used to partition an external hard drive that has data on it.

We will use the same software to partition the formatted capacity.

As long as you dont want to create partitions with less capacity than the data already on the drive, partitioning shouldnt have to require erasing any existing data.

If you are using Time Machine, you can restore your data from a Time Machine backup after you partition the drive.

Once Disk Utility is done partitioning your drive, the partitions will appear on your desktop as individual hard drive icons.

For example, if you partition a 2TB hard drive into three partitions, three hard drive icons will appear.

Here is the tutorial on how to partition the startup drive while its being used to boot your Mac.

Once youve copied your data, go to ApplicationsUtilities and open Disk Utility.

For example, in the screenshot here, the first drive listed (320.07 Hitachi) is the internal drive of my iMac.

Listed underneath that is the one partition thats on the internal drive called iMac.

The second drive listed (1 TB CalDigit) is an external hard drive with a single partition called 1TB External.

There is a set of tabs across the top right part of Disk Utility.

To partition a drive, the first step is to select the drive you want to partition in the left column and click on the Partition tab.

How To Partition 1Tb External Hard Drive For Windows And Mac Time Machine