Posted on 7/6/10

MacMost Forum / How to merge 2 out of 3 partitions on External HDD

Hey Gary,

I have a 320GB external Seagate HDD, which has 3 partitions. I want to retain one partition, which has important stuff, but erase the other two and merge them into one partition. Is it possible without formatting the whole drive?

– Dhruv

One Response to “How to merge 2 out of 3 partitions on External HDD”

  1. Gary Rosenzweig says:
    7/6/10 at 9:45 am

    It is possible, if the drive and partitions are formatted with the most advanced Mac format and there is enough room on the drive for Disk Utility to work with. I wouldn’t try it without backing it up first, though, as things could go wrong. So, since backing up is advised, and that means copying the whole thing anyway, then why bother?
    Drives are cheap. And a 320GB one is small compared to sub-$100 drives today which are 1TB. Why not just update to a new drive, set it up like you want, and then copy everything over?
    If you don’t want to do that, I would simply advise copying the important partition’s contents somewhere, trying the re-arranging of the partitions in Disk Utility. If it works, great. If not, then erase and re-create the drive with the new partitions and then copy everything over.

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