I like it when you jump in. No worries.
I think I've been asking the wrong questions. I don't really need to partition my Internal SSD. I've never done that before with my old HDD and don't feel the need to now. I'm making this more complicated than I need to. After doing this for a few days, I think I just want to put Sierra onto my external drive and back it up occasionally like I am doing with my HDD. It's just been so many years since I partitioned my ext. drive that I forgot what to do.
I just now resized my external drive partitions and erased Mt. Lion. Unfortunately, it still shows up and the numbers I resized everything to changed to another number. I'd just better leave this alone I guess and backup Sierra on my new MBP. My external drive will no longer allow me to resize the partitions, maybe that is what you and Artie were warning me about. Fortunately, they are large enough to hold what I need.
PMFJI but I want to point out...
- Macintosh HD is your boot volume and is 120 GB in size out of which you are curretnluy using only a little over 13 GB
- Allowing for some overhead a clone partition/volume of 150 GB would be more than adequate
- Your Sierra partition/volume on the WD My Passport at 333 GB is twice what you should need for a backup clone
- Artie is correct that changing partition sizes is possible, but there are rules on which partitions can be resized non-destructively, and even if you follow all the rules correctly there is still a finite risk of losing data.
Since you no longer want Mountain Lion and rather than over-complicating the process and your d=current partitions are more than adequate for clone images why not…
- Erase the Mountain Lion volume
- Rename it something like Archives or Installers
- Use the renamed partition to store dowloaded application and OS install .dmg file.
If you were operating much closer to capacity on the partitions then more thought and planning would definitely be in order, but in this case it does not appear to be worth the additional effort.
