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Apple Users

Stinky The Clown

(68,572 posts) Sun Mar 3, 2013, 07:24 PM Mar 2013

Of Portable Drives and Partitions [View all]

I have a 500GB LaCie "Rugged" portable hard drive with Firewire 800. Good drive, by the way.

Anyway . . . . it came with a MacOS and a Windows FAT32 partitions. I have no need of the FAT32 partition. It is just taking up space. There is no data on it.

Is there any reason to keep it? Can I delete it and recover the space dedicated to it? If I can, how do I do it? Do I need to reformat as one partition? I can easily move the data to another drive if I need to, and then move it back when done.

Thanks!

13 replies

= new reply since forum marked as read

Highlight:

Of Portable Drives and Partitions [View all] Stinky The Clown Mar 2013 OP

Since you have it, back up the most important 500GB in you life, then bury it. NYC_SKP Mar 2013 #1

I have a portable lacie. The partitioning instructions came in the manual. I would robinlynne Mar 2013 #2

I'm taking a wild guess here, based on long past experience NV Whino Mar 2013 #3

Repartition options fpublic Mar 2013 #4

This message was self-deleted by its author guyton Mar 2013 #5

I'm thinking of zapping my Bootcamp partition. I have Vista on it, but it looks like the new OS X davidwparker Mar 2013 #13

^ Like he says, you can do it on-the-fly, but I never do sir pball Mar 2013 #6

Actually, Disk Utility will not allow a dynamic change to this drive. Stinky The Clown Mar 2013 #7

It's apparently formatted to boot Windows sir pball Mar 2013 #8

Thanks! That clarifies it. Stinky The Clown Mar 2013 #9

Then trash it ASAP...FAT32 is outdated anyway. sir pball Mar 2013 #10

Can a Mac read NTFS? Stinky The Clown Mar 2013 #11

Read natively, write with utilities sir pball Mar 2013 #12