[MacDV] Re: Disk Fragmentation > Reformatting Single Partitions

[Dorothy Hennings]

Mike,
It was very good of you to actually run thru the procedures on 
reformatting. I'm sure a lot of us were glad to have the details and 
will print out your directions for future use.

On Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 09:45 AM, Michael Winter wrote:

>
> On Tuesday, April 15, 2003, at 02:54  PM, Illovox Media wrote:
>
>> Please share your process for doing that.  I have wanted to be able 
>> to do
>> that for years, and do not know how.  Any reformat I know destroys
>> everything on all partitions...
>
> Sorry I took so long to respond, but since several people were telling 
> me that they didn't think it would work, I decided I'd better be sure, 
> so I hooked up an old 10 GB drive (USB) and went through all the steps 
> to be sure. Here's how it works in OS X:
>
> Open up "Disk Utility" and select the "Erase" tab. Two things to note. 
> First, the list of drives in the pane alone the left. It will list 
> each physical device and just below, indented slightly, will be the 
> list of Volumes (partitions) on that device. So my device shows up as > :
>
> 9.44 GB IBM -
>      Music
>      Photos
>
> So you can see its a 10 (9.44) GB device with two Volumes (partitions) 
> labeled "Music" and "Photos".
>
> The second point to note is the warnings in the main panel. The first 
> bullet point is:
>
> "Erasing a disk results in all volumes of that disk being erased and 
> one large volume being created on that disk."
>
> The second bullet point is :
>
> "Erasing a volume results in a clean volume being created."
>
> Note the distinction between erasing a disk and a volume (partition).
>
>
> So the short answer is that if you only want to erase a single volume, 
> you select just that volume in the left pane before you click the 
> erase button. If you select the drive, you will erase the entire 
> drive. If you select a partition, you will erase only that partition.
>
> -Mike
>
>
>