Mac Partitioning with Disk Utility vs. Professional Partition Manager Software

The need for Mac drive partition management comes into the picture when you want to effectively utilize your disk space. At any point of time, you may want to add a new partition for keeping a dedicated area of the disk to store your crucial business files. In other cases, you may require deleting an old partition and reusing the space for yet another purpose. Mac OS X has a partition management tool, known as Disk Utility. Using Disk Utility, you can perform live partitioning on your OS X drive. The Mac drive partitioning process always has a risk of failure and data loss. In order to avoid any data disaster while partitioning, you should backup all data to a different location or another external drive.

Creating and Resizing Partitions Using Disk Utility

The primary idea behind partitioning drive is to enjoy the benefits of multi-boot system configuration. You can setup a Bootcamp partition and install any other operating system like Windows, and Linux. Generally, partitioning is done to create a new data storage partition. Disk Utility can be used to manually add a partition to your hard drive. The OS X drive initially comes with a single partition with default named 'Macintosh HD' that takes all the available space on your drive.

When you open Disk Utility and select the physical device, the 'Partition' tab appears that shows all partitions on the drive. You should resize the 'Macintosh HD' partition in order to create sufficient space for the new partition to be added. You can do so by either specifying the desired partition size or adjusting the size of your partition in the 'Volume Scheme' section. You cannot reduce the partition size to less than the space occupied by the data stored on it.

Once you have resized the 'Macintosh HD' partition by dragging the right corner point to upward direction and created enough space for the new partition, click on the “+” button. It will add a new partition to your Mac hard drive. You can now resize both the partitions by moving the separator between them. With Disk Utility, you can setup a multiple-partition scheme using the drop-down menu.

There is a range of other commercial Mac drive partition management tools in the market. These partition managers facilitate risk-free partitioning operations on your Mac hard drive, including creating, deleting, resizing, and formatting a partition. With these competent tools, you can also hide or reveal a partition when needed. Furthermore, they are compatible with Mavericks till the lower versions.

Why Disk Utility Fails to Partition Mac HDD?

Mac HDD Partitioning

Although it seems very easy to partition Mac drive with Disk Utility, but many times, we see an error “Your disk could not be partitioned” during partitioning Mac drive. So, at this stage, third party software comes into limelight as a boon with an easy solution.

If you are facing these kinds of errors or you want to hide any important drive volume then try Stellar Partition Manager software and optimize your Mac storage area efficiently. This software is compatible with OS X Mavericks and other previous versions till OS X 10.3. If you are partitioning Mac drive then all you need to have just Stellar Partition Manager tool, 25 MB free storage area, 512 MB of RAM and follow the below mentioned cases as suitable:

• Create New Partition

Run Stellar Partition Manager software

Select free spaces scattered among existing Mac volumes (in case of multiple free spaces)

Click on 'New Partition' option and mention new volume name & size

Click OK

• Delete New Partition

Run Stellar Partition Manager software

Select Mac volume

Click on 'Delete Volume' option

• Format Mac Drive Partition

Run Stellar Partition Manager software

Select Mac volume

Click on 'Format Volume' option in above side

Wait till the partition is formatted successfully

• Resize Mac Drive Partition

If you want to increase the partition size, select volume and drag the right corner point slider to downward direction as desired and click 'OK'

     Vice-versa, if you want to decrease the volume size then drag the slider bar to the upward direction

• Hide/Reveal Mac Drive Partition

Choose the volume, you want to hide and click on 'Hide'

To reveal the hidden volume, select hidden volume from the left pane and click on 'Reveal'

Stellar Partition Manger does all these within few clicks without any data related issues and lets you sit with an ease.