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Maintenance for Your Drive
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Reformat with Partitions
‘Partitioning’ a hard drive is the process of dividing a hard drive into separate,
discrete sections called ‘volumes’. Each volume works like a separate disk. You can
create up to 16 different partitions on a hard drive in OS X and each partition can
be a different size and format.
With hard drives getting bigger, it is useful to partition your hard drive so sections
of its space can be used for different purposes. For instance, segment user data from
backup data, set up a multi-boot environment with different Operating Systems or cre-
ate a dedicated capture scratch disk for programs like Final Cut Pro.
The following steps will guide you through this simple process of partitioning your
drive.
In this example, we will partition a 500 GB G-DRIVE mini connected via FireWire. The
steps will be identical for your drive, only the name may be different.
1. First, open the Disk Utility program. This application is located on your hard drive un-
der Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility. The window below will appear. Your
G-Technology drive will be displayed in the left-hand column.
