Add partition in external hard drive without losing data

[beelow]

Hi,

I am planning to put a partition to my external hard drive without losing any data. I'm running 10.5.5.Heard of I can resize partitions using a grab tab in Disk Utility without losing any data. However, that grab tab only appears for my main hard drive. That is, when my laptop hard drive volume is chosen, I click on the partition tab and see the grab tab in the lower right corner and the "+" available for clicking. When my external drive is highlighted, however, I click on the partition tab and see no grab tab and the "+" and "-" signs are both gray, unavailable for clicking.Do I need to use something like iPartition to add a partition to the external drive, or is there a way to do it in Disk Utility?

Any thoughts?

[Dr. V]

Well,You can accomplish usually with third party application but if you have Windows Vista you can shrink the existing partition and create a new partition using the Disk Manager.Again, if you have Windows Vista you can use the Disk Manager otherwise you might require a copy of Partition Magic or a freeware alternative like gParted or something similar.

[Lillebror]

Of course which means that your external is exhausted to let live partitioning. Let me know the capacity and what have you been using the drive for?I don't agree that is bit risky per se, no more than any other disk operation. Backups are always a good idea.I haven't had real backups until about a year ago, and only in the last month is all the data I care about actually protected and only ever had one real drive crash with lost data. I consider myself lucky. The only data lost were a few really basic web sites I used while learning HTML, but man, I'd love to have those back.

[Calvin K]

Me not a big fan of external drives for just the reason you have went through.They can simply become flaky even more so than internally hooked drives.Of course you can have multiple partitions on your external drive .. there are many programs that can "add" and shift partitions without losing data even though mistakes with partition modifying can happen and you could be the cause of data lose the old time favorite Partition Magic comes to mind as well as my all time favorite Boot IT NG free to with in the trial period