partition

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in asking about the inability to format a drive due to "partition map" errors, how to determine what is using up space rapidly on the hard drive, how to restore a missing Safari program, and the options for tackling an iMac that continually shuts off in the middle of use. I welcome contributions from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Unable to format a … Read more

A full-featured disk management utility is something most experienced Windows users need, whether it's to add and format a new hard drive, configure a USB drive, or copy partitions or whole drives and move them to new drives. MiniTool Partition Wizard is a powerful but easy-to-use partition manager that does all that and much more, and it's free, too. It supports FAT, NTFS, EXT, and Linux Swap file systems, and all hard-disk types recognized by Windows, including RAID arrays. It's also compatible with both MBR and GPT partition tables. Partition Wizard supports hard disks of up to … Read more

Disk Drill for Mac is a useful utility that creates a recovery disk volume with copies of your important files. If you delete a file by accident, you can then recover it from that vault. If the file is recently deleted, you can probably even recover it from the original volume. In addition, Disk Drill for Mac also monitors the state of your hard drive and notifies you of potential failures or capacity limitations. Disk Drill for Mac is a slimmed-down version available for free, with the Pro edition available for $89.99. With the free version, disk scanning and … Read more

Hard drives are easily surpassing 3TB storage capacities, either individually or when used in RAID arrays, and have become attractive options for external storage on various Mac users, not only for various data libraries (i.e., iTunes and iPhoto), but also for Time Machine backups. However, some people have encountered an apparent bug in which using some drives in Mountain Lion results in partitioning errors and the inability to access data on the drives.

When the problems happen, the drive becomes inaccessible, and when checking with Disk Utility users will see an error that states, "Error: Partition map repair … Read more

When you add a new hard drive or SSD to your system, you must format and partition it before you can use it. The best tool for the job is a full-featured disk partition manager, which can not only format and partition drives but repartition them, too, or change the partition type when your needs change; for instance, if you should move your C drive to an SSD, you can repartition the old drive for media storage. EaseUS Partition Master Home Edition is just such a tool. Unlike some so-called free disk partition managers, EaseUS Partition Master is a full-featured … Read more

Losing a disk partition can really make your day. It can happen in lots of ways, including viruses, bad software, and operator error. EaseUs Partition Recovery is a free tool that can recover and restore lost or damaged partitions in many cases. It can recover partitions on most hard disks, including IDE, ATA, SATA, and SCSI drives and FAT, NTFS, and EXT formats, for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. It recovers MBR and GPT partitions, too.

EaseUs Partition Recovery's wizard-based interface serves the dual purpose of making the tool very easy to use and of reducing the chance of … Read more

Many people prefer to use a standalone disk management utility instead of the Windows Disk Manager for resizing and moving partitions, formatting disks, and other critical tasks. Until recently, most such tools have been premium software, but Aomei Partition Assistant Home Edition is a full-featured freeware disk management utility that can even be used commercially, which is great news for home and small businesses.

It can create, convert, hide, format, delete, wipe, resize, copy, split, merge, and move partitions, including altering existing partitions without data loss or corruption, on hard drives, flash drives, and similar storage devices. It works in … Read more

If you need to expand your storage space with an external hard drive and you use both Mac and PC, you'll likely run into a few obstacles. Hard drives advertised as being compatible with Windows and Mac OS may have misled you into thinking you could actually use one hard drive for both computers.

You can, but not out of the box.

Most external hard drives (HD) are sold in a format called NTFS, which is designed to work with Windows. Macs read and write to a different format, called HFS+. Another format, called FAT32 is compatible with both … Read more

It's likely that your hard drives are all formatted with one large partition.

The major advantage to splitting up individual disks into multiple partitions is to soften the blow when you need to reinstall your OS. This is achieved by putting your OS and applications on one partition and your media on a separate one.

For Windows users, there are several third-party programs that you can download/purchase that will assist you with this process. In reality, none of these are really necessary because Windows comes with a built-in (and well-hidden) disk-management system. Let's get started.