External hardrive

4 Oct 2014 21:15:14

Graham Caves

Hello Folks,

On my external drive I have 6 part partitions. 4 of them I use often for current projects but two of them I never use as they have Lion operating system on one and the other has Mountain Lion on.

I would like to ask using Disk utility could I wipe those two partitions clean and just have an odd application from my current operating system Mavericks.

So on one partition I might have just iPhoto say and on the other one something else. I would still have six partitions so would it matter if you have just an application on that partition?

Would it work ok?

Hope somebody can help and look forward to some advice and help.

Many thanks

Graham Caves

Re: External hardrive

5 Oct 2014 19:16:09

Mick Burrell

That should be fine Graham.

You cannot reparation without losing all your data but you can erase individual partitions and use them for whatever you want.

Re: External hardrive

5 Oct 2014 19:46:12

Graham Caves

Hello Mick,

Thanks for your reply - that is a very helpful answer.

As you say about partition size I will keep those as the six I have, wipe 2 clean and play around over the next week.

Just one more question - from Mavericks can you copy an application from your iMac HD to one of the partitions? I think I would like to have iPhoto on my Mac and on one partition and pages and keynote on the second partition as well as the Mac.

I will play around with this over the next week or so and let you know how it goes.

Thanks for your time Mick

Regards

Graham

Re: External hardrive

7 Oct 2014 09:34:23

Mick Burrell

That is possible but do be aware that the external drive will be slower than the internal one. You haven't given a reason for wanting to do this but if it's a shortage of space on the internal drive then it may be worth leaving the applications on the internal drive and moving your data to the external.

Come back if you need more help with that.

Re: External hardrive

7 Oct 2014 21:00:58

Graham Caves

Hello Mick,

My reason for doing this is simply to keep some work projects separate from my iMac.

I have over 200GBs free on the Mac so loads of space but it just seemed a good idea to do.

I have cleared the two partitions using disk utility and have started to run applications on the external drive with so far no problems.

It doesn't seem any slower but possibly because I type so slowly!

Graham

Re: External hardrive

8 Oct 2014 08:57:53

Mick Burrell

Do make sure you have a backup of those work projects, not just the one copy on your external drive. If you have backups to other partitions on the same drive, I'd suggest this is not safe - if the drive electronics fail, you'll lose access to all six partitions.