On Mon, 1 Nov 1999, Henry B. Hotz wrote:

> At 4:17 PM -0800 10/30/99, Sean-Paul Rees wrote:
> >Is there a neat partitioning tool for Macintosh so I can resize my Mac
> >partition and create a NetBSD root and NetBSD usr partition?
> >
> >My NetBSD drive died :(
> 
> Sort-of.  Most MacOS disk formatters will do the job.
> 
> When you resize a MacOS partition you loose the data on it, you know.

Not necessarily, no.  Most commercial formatters can do lossless shrinking
and expansion.  Note that since the allocation size can't change, you end
up wasting space, and that you can only expand it up to the maximum size
allowed by the block/allocation size.

Note that programs like FWB's hard disk toolkit frequently refuse to
shrink partitions in a way that would require moving data around.  That
means that you'll probably have to run Norton speed disk or similar to
force the data to the front of the partition before you can get any useful
shrinking.  (Normally, the finder data tends to optimize itself to the
very _end_ of the partition....)


David