From the “Partitions” tab, simply drag the separating bar between existing partitions either up or down to resize as needed.As usual, backup the drive before beginning to be safe: This can be done through Disk Utility very easily by doing the following actions. Resizing an existing partition to a new size allows to either grow or shrink the total capacity available to a partition. How to Resize Existing Partitions on Mac OS X Click “Apply” for changes to take effect on the drive. Remember, if you delete a partition, you will lose data that exists on it. All you need to do is follow the steps above to get to the partition table, select the partition you want to delete, and then click the “-” button rather than the plus icon. Removing partitions is just as easy as creating one. Time Machine will backup a drive until the available space is taken, so if you set it to backup to a partition, it will only take up that space and leave the other partition alone, allowing the drive to serve multiple uses and allowing you to effectively share a single hard drive for both Time Machine and other uses. Another common use is to partition large external hard drives for a specific Time Machine backup partition, and then a separate storage partition. I partitioned my drive before installing Mac OS X Lion so that I could maintain my stable Mac OS X 10.6 system software while still exploring the Lion 10.7 Developer Preview, and I do this frequently with other software releases as well, even with El Capitan and Snow Leopard side by side on different partitions. The video below demonstrates how to partition a hard disk in Mac OS X with the new versions of Disk Utility, found in El Capitan 10.11 and later releases of Mac OS system software.

A new partition will behave like a new hard drive, and it will appear on your Desktop as a new drive which can be ejected, mounted, formatted, just like a hard disk. Nonetheless, there is always a chance something could go wrong, which is why I recommended you backup your drive first.Īfter you have clicked ‘Apply’ to create the new partition, it will be immediately accessible in the Finder to use how you want. You can make partitions any size as long as you have the available disk space to accommodate it, and creating the partition shouldn’t affect your existing filesystem either as long as there is free space. Click on “Apply” to create the new partition.Specify a name for the new partition, select a filesystem type (Mac OS Extended Journaled is default), and choose a size either by manually entering a capacity or by dragging the slider bar in the partition map.Click on the + button to add a new partition.Select the hard disk you want to partition from the left side of the app.

Launch Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities/.

How to Add a New Hard Drive Partition in Mac OS X

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