The more you explore your Mac computer, the more you fall in love with it. Mac systems are manufactured to last, are designed to perform, and aim to provide the best experience to its users. As compared to other computer systems, Mac offers a high level of quality, advanced functionality, and beautifully designed interface that you just love to work on. Apart from all this, Mac is smart enough to provide you with advantageous solutions when you get stuck with unfavourable conditions, one of such situations is partitions that run out of space. Space is a major problem for all of them who need to store data in bulk that requires more and more space every day; your Mac machine gives relief in this case.
Well, you might be thinking that people who use computers other than Mac also face the same annoying situations. That is true, but Mac makes difference here. Size issue is obvious when you just keep on adding bundles of data to the hard drive of your system and consequently, it informs you about lack of space on it. Being an ardent computer folk, you know it well how to handle such situation, and if you do not, we are here let you know how to deal with it. This is a great thing that your Mac allows you to create new partitions or resize an existing partition when it has data stored on it. Empowered with an immensely helpful tool ‘Disk Utility’, Mac system is powerful to do it. Well, if you have not read about partitioning, let us make it clear. It is a feature in Mac introduced to divide the hard drive into partitions without requiring you to boot up the system with startup disk. Earlier, it was mandatory to use the startup disk to boot the system or go for an external utility to perform partitioning. Bootcamp in Mac does not need rebooting Mac to partition the drive.
Let us shed some light on Disk Utility and steps to resize a partition on Mac drive using the utility. Before you start, make sure that you have a complete and latest copy of backup of the entire Mac data. If backup is not available, partitioning, despite being an interesting and effective feature, may be destructive. Data backup is an important task to perform before you attempt to deal with such cases. If you do not have a backup, there are chances that you come across huge data loss if problems occur during the process. With a backup copy on hand, you can simply restore data from it without experiencing any loss. Coming back to Disk Utility, which is designed by Apple for Mac based computer systems to facilitate disk repair, erase, RAID, and restore. Yes, you can simply fix disk problems with repair permissions, and erase the drive if you do not need the data or want to empty it; however, make certain that you back up the data before erasing, as every single piece of information will just be removed. Next, RAID allows you to set up a Striped RAID, which is for performance or Mirrored RAID, which is for backup. Lastly, with the ‘Restore’ feature, you can copy all the contents of your hard drive to any desired location on your system or any external media.
Well, the point of focus here is resizing or creating a partition; let us sees the way Disk Utility works for you when you resize or create a partition on your Mac drive.
You can open the Disk Utility from Finder by clicking ‘Applications’, clicking ‘Utilities’, and then double-clicking the Disk Utility to launch it. Perform the below given steps:
Step 1: When the utility is opened, select your drive; you will see five tabs within the utility.
Step 2: Switch to the ‘Partition’ tab and click the ‘+’ sign located under Volume Scheme.
Step 3: Your drive will be divided into two parts. You can click the ‘+’ sign repeatedly, if you need more than two partitions.
Step 4: Next, to resize the partitions, you just need to move the slider up and down; the slider appears between partitions. Alternatively, select the desired partition and specify the size in the ‘Size’ field appeared at the right side of Volume Scheme.
Step 5: Click ‘Apply’, Disk Utility will show a sheet with the volume you want to resize.
Step 6: Click ‘Partition’ button. The partition that you selected will be resized as per your requirement without any loss of data.
You are done with resizing the drive. At the same time, you might think that you do not need some partitions; in this case, click ‘-‘ sign or clicking on ‘Revert’ will get your partition to the state, as it was earlier. Moreover, you may also choose to select the Format from the respective field located on the right side of Volume Scheme. This is how you can create or resize your Mac drive to eliminate space issues.
However, unfortunately, there are cases that Disk Utility is not able to deal with and results in failure. In such situations, you need to use a commercial software application to resize Mac partitions. The program will just require you to provide essential inputs and rest it will do automatically. However, it is important for you to look for an intelligent tool that is capable to perform the task adequately.
Guest article written by: Vishal is a technical writer who covers topic on Mac OS X. He keeps experimenting on his MacBook Pro and share useful information with Mac users. You can catch him on Facebook & Google + for more updates on OS X.
Very good informative article on mac partition