Is it possible to repartition a hard drive without having to erase it.<br><br>I have a firewire drive I use for a back up. I'd like to repartition it so I can put another version of OS X on it. I have 10.3.9 on the firewire drive now and it's formatted as one big partition. I'd like to make that partition smaller so I can put a second partition on it and install 10.2.8<br><br><br><br>

No.<br><br>

Yes. Don't listen to Sam. <br><br>

Yeah, those look trustworthy. <br><br>

Hey, he didn't ask for trustworthy. Yeah, all these products get mixed reviews at best. And for what some of them cost, you can buy a new hard drive, partition it and clone the old drive over which is what I would do but I have four Firewire hard drives so that wouldn't be a problem. When I installed Tiger on my G5 I didn't even bother repartitioning the drive, I just bought a second internal 160 GIgger and installed it on that. Much easier to switch back to Panther that way.<br><br>

probably would be better to get a new firewire drive.<br><br>Another question. I have a firewire drive with 10.3.3 on it and thought I would just reinstall the OS on that drive. I tried running the 10.2 installer (putting the disk in and hit the restart computer to install). It just rebooted back into 10.4.1 which is running on my laptop HD.<br><br>If I hold the 'C' key while rebooting it boots off the firewire drive in 10.3.3. If I click install on the 10.2 drive, it just boots back in 10.4.1<br><br>It seems I can't boot off the 10.2 disk to install. Am I missing any tricks?<br><br>

probably would be better to get a new firewire drive.<br><br><br>Here's a thought: why not get some cheap (well, not 'cheap' cheap- you know what I mean) 40-60gb hard drives for all the various OS's you're testing against?<br><br>This way you could also keep your main internal HD clean and always on the *latest* OS. <br><br><br>Back in Black...

I'm on a laptop. <br><br>I don't dare touch Ginny's PowerMac, there is just too much valuable stuff on there. Sometimes if I just glance at her computer she whacks me in the back of the head for even looking, let alone thinking about it. <br><br><br><br><br>

That's why I'm saying to go with the FW drive option...<br><br>I'd love some video of her whacking you, btw. <br><br>EDIT: Um, on second thought...<br><br>Back in Black...

How old is the PowerBook? Apple doesn't allow too much backward compatibility so it may be too new to install 10.2 on. Have you ever been able to boot from the disk? The Panther install disks that came with my G5 were unbootable and a quick scan of the Apple forum told me they had a bad batch of disks. A call to Apple got me a set of replacement disks.<br><br>If you want to go the cheap hard drive route and don't want a bunch of Firewire cases cluttering up your workspace maybe this would be an option. Not cheap but if you'll only use the disks infrequently, it saves a lot of space.<br><br>