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Create HFS+ and FAT32 partitions on one external drive - use diskutil
Authored by: FyKnight on Jan 20, '04 08:31:49PM

That diskutil method rocks! I tried it last night and it worked a charm - first time.

The best bit is it does all the legwork for you, you don't have to fiddle around with mounting and unmounting drives, counting cylinders, allocating partitions or anything like that.

I have now successfully partitioned a 200G firewire drive into HFS+ and FAT32. And the FAT32 partition even mounts fine in linux. Thanks for the hint!

{P^/

btw The man page for diskutil is worth a read too.



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Create HFS+ and FAT32 partitions on one external drive - use diskutil
Authored by: grantjs on Jan 23, '04 05:22:55PM

Trying to create 3 partitions, I hit a small snag (probably user error)... at first I performed and received the following message:

[diskutil partitionDisk /dev/rdisk4 3 UFS Unix 50G MS-DOS MS-DOS 50G HFS+ MacOS 180G
Could not find disk for /dev/rdisk4.]

So referring to the man pages tried:
[diskutil partitionDisk disk4 3 UFS Unix 50G MS-DOS MS-DOS 50G HFS+ MacOS 180G]

And then no problem, getting back:

[Finished partitioning on disk disk4
/dev/disk4
#: type name size identifier
0: Apple_partition_scheme *232.9 GB disk4
1: Apple_partition_map 31.5 KB disk4s1
2: Apple_Boot 8.5 MB disk4s2
3: Apple_UFS Unix 48.4 GB disk4s3
4: DOS_FAT_32 MS-DOS 50.0 GB disk4s4
5: Apple_HFS MacOS 132.8 GB disk4s6]

Great tip!



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Create HFS+ and FAT32 partitions on one external drive - use diskutil
Authored by: muze7 on Feb 07, '04 01:33:41PM

Hi,

I am new here but tried something similar and failed.

diskutil partitionDisk disk1 2 MBRFormat HFS+ TEST 30G MS-DOS TEST2 10G

I need the MBRFormat to make the second partition readable under Windows but get the error:

There are too many arguments for the number of partitions specified.

I do not see why though, as I specified two partitions and two series of parameters.
If I get rid of the MBRFormat it works, but I need it!

Any ideas?

Thanks heaps
Bridget



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Create HFS+ and FAT32 partitions on one external drive - use diskutil
Authored by: moritzh on Mar 05, '04 06:10:06PM
Well, it wouldn't help you now anyway (since you got it working already), but I think your mistake was that you typed
/dev/rdisk4
instead of
/dev/disk4
Small and subtle difference that was pointed out in the original post...

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Create HFS+ and FAT32 partitions on one external drive - use diskutil
Authored by: hellomilano on Sep 28, '05 02:20:30PM

Bravo!...worked seamlessly on OSX 10.4 and Windows XP and I have never touched UNIX before. Only addition to above line of code was 'MBRFormat' as noted in original posting. Both booted up without effort on Mac & Win.
Grazie!



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Create HFS+ and FAT32 partitions on one external drive - use diskutil
Authored by: osxpounder on Sep 29, '05 12:42:46PM

Not working for me. I followed silentaccord's instructions, and everything stops at step 5: "5) Now use fdisk to create the master boot record (MBR) so Windows will recognize the FAT32 partition:
fdisk -e /dev/disk4" [disk4 is the disk I'm working with]

On my machine, fdisk tells me "/dev/disk4 is not a character device or a regular file" and pdisk tells me "can't open file 'disk4' (No such file or directory)". I have fdisk(8), and I'm running OSX 10.3.9.

Can't understand why Disk Utility can tell me that, yes, disk4 is mounted, but it can mount/unmount it, but fdisk swears there's no such disk4. I can use diskutil to mountDisk, too. What do think's wrong? Did I miss something?

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osxpounder



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Create HFS+ and FAT32 partitions on one external drive - use diskutil
Authored by: osxpounder on Sep 29, '05 02:13:54PM

I worked past my fdisk error: turns out I must specify the disk name differently. Although 'disk4' is what Disk Utility identifies as this disk, I had to use 'fdisk -e /dev/rdisk4' ....

So I managed to use fdisk to make the partitions, one HFS+ and one FAT32, then attached the external drive to a WinXp box. It recognized an unformatted volume, and let me format it [in this case, to 64GB].

Now, on the Mac, the FAT32 volume won't mount. Disk Utility calls it 'disk5s5', even in the graphic interface's left pane. I tried ejecting the disk and remounting. Nope. Tried just ejecting the Mac volume, which mounts every time I attach the disk, but 'disk5s5' still won't mount. Tried ejecting just the Mac volume. Tried using the buttons in DU to mount the disk5s5 volume. Nope and nope.

So I tried using the CLI and diskutil. diskutil reports that disk5s5 is mounted, but ... it doesn't show up in Finder.

If I click "Verify Disk" in DU's GUI with disk5s5 selected [greyed, not mounted, even though diskutil says it's mounted], I get:
Verifying volume "disk5s5"
BAD SUPER BLOCK: MAGIC NUMBER WRONG
** /dev/rdisk5s5 (NO WRITE)

LOOK FOR ALTERNATE SUPERBLOCKS? no


1 volume checked
1 non HFS volume checked

Now I'm really stuck, but I'm going to keep plugging at this.



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osxpounder



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