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Posted By: jaybass partitioning - 06/20/17 10:35 PM
OS 10.11.6

I tried to partition an external HD (1) TB and after 3 hrs, I forced quit disk utility because the resizing just kept going.

I had divided it into 500gb each half. I highlighted the HD and under info, it shows that it had indeed been partitioned. I want (1) half for backup. Is it safe to try a backup? Never having used a partition for backing up, does superduper show which half you are backing up to? Looking at my desktop now shows another HD (untitled) which has 500gb available so I guess that should solve my query.

Any comments or advice anyone.

jaybass
Posted By: joemikeb Re: partitioning - 06/21/17 01:10 AM
I presume the partitioned drive already had data on it because partioning or re-partitioning an empty drive should take only a few seconds. If you are partioning or re-partitioning a drive that has data on it the new partition has to be on empty consecutive sectors so the data has to be moved to clear the way for the new partition, which can take a l o n g time. After partitioning Disk Utiity would show one partition with the same name as the original volume and one unnamed volume, which you could give any name you want.

If the drive was initially empty and took that long to partition, it is likely there were a whole lot of errors and I would not want to put anything on the drive I wasn't willing to lose without notice.

If you want to verify the drive try Disk First Aid on both volumes and check the S.M.A.R.T. Rating on the drive. Even better would be a surface scan of the drive or a utility like TechTool Pro that reports the individual SMART values and not just the aggregate pass/fail.
Posted By: jaybass Re: partitioning - 06/21/17 02:12 PM
Yes, the partitioned drive did have data on it but the other half did not.

And yes, the back up took well over 3 hours.

Starting up with S/L, I ran all 3 external drives through first aid, all passing.

Rebooting from E/C, I ran the 3 external drives through first aid but the E/C back up failed, but after running it through again, it was repaired and passed. I also ran the main HD and it was repaired. So far so good. My TTP needs an upgrade for E/C but I have ordered a D/W upgrade.

Thank you for your info, they were very useful.

jaybass

Posted By: Virtual1 Re: partitioning - 06/26/17 05:20 PM
I've had very bad results using the latest variation of Disk Utility. It has ALL sorts of problems trying to partition and erase. I very rarely get though an erase on the first try. It'll nuke the partition table and then puke up an error and I have to retry it usually. A few times I've had to drop into terminal and spam some zeros onto the platters to get it to quit trying to "adjust" it and just get on with the formatting. Completely unacceptable behavior for what should be a user-friendly noob-facing application.
Posted By: tacit Re: partitioning - 07/11/17 06:48 AM
Originally Posted By: Virtual1
I've had very bad results using the latest variation of Disk Utility. It has ALL sorts of problems trying to partition and erase. I very rarely get though an erase on the first try. It'll nuke the partition table and then puke up an error and I have to retry it usually. A few times I've had to drop into terminal and spam some zeros onto the platters to get it to quit trying to "adjust" it and just get on with the formatting. Completely unacceptable behavior for what should be a user-friendly noob-facing application.


I just got a new laptop to replace my aging 2012 Macbook Pro, and I encountered the same thing while trying to format an external USB hard drive.

Not only that, but I learned something else: the latest Disk Utility will often report that it successfully did something that it did not, in fact, do. For example, if you try to change the size of a partition on an encrypted disk, Disk Utility will say "Success" but do nothing; the partition size will not be changed. Disk Utility is incapable of changing partitions on an encrypted disk, but nowhere is this documented, and you will receive no warning that you can't do this if you try.
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