Hi,

Recently, the hard drive in my powerbook started to make strange sounds and give I/O errors, so I backed it up, pulled it out, bought a new 120 GB hard drive and installed OS X tiger.

Fine so far, but when it came to partitioning the drive I chose 'Mac OS extended (case sensitive)', since it seemed the most reasonable, even if it wasn't the default selection. ('reasonable', since I'm mostly a Linux user...I wasn't even aware that HFS+ was case-insensitive).

Apparently I should have looked into it a bit further and learned that HFS+ is case-insensitive, and the case-sensitive version presented here is HFSX...then looked even further to realize that this can cause problems with certain applications (I'm looking at you, Photoshop!) that expect a case-insensitive file system...

Oops!

While installing those applications onto a sparse disk image is an okay workaround, it already seems like a bit of a hassle, and I could imagine that it might cause some applications to crash only *sometimes*. I'd really just prefer to have OS X running on the default fielsystem.

so, at this point, I'd like to (in order of preference):

a) convert the HFSX volumes into plain-old HFS+ volumes

b) backup what is there, then wipe the drive and restore

or

c) wipe the drive and start over...

Right now the disk is partitioned as two HFSX volumes and 18GB of free space (onto which I will eventually install Linux). One HFSX volume is the 'system' and the other is 'data', with 'data' almost completely empty still.

My questions (finally) are:

-Is there a way to 'downgrade' from HFSX to HFS+? or am I stuck having to reinstall the system? Could this cause any issues?

-If not, is it possible to do something like the following?

1- delete 'data' partition
2- create HFS+ partition called 'system2'
3- copy/clone 'system' partition to 'system2'
4- set the 'system2' partition to be the startup disk
5- delete 'system' partition
6- create HFS+ partition called 'data2'

thanks very much...

Changing partition sizes or format schemes using disk utility will wipe everything off your hard disk. So you MUST make backup's before embarking on changing the format scheme. There is Disk Studio a commercial application that can do what you want but I would still advise caution and back everything before changing anything as Murphy's Law will still swing into action if you have important data.

Good luck

In reply to:

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Changing partition sizes or format schemes using disk utility will wipe everything off your hard disk.

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hmm, really? I should be able to delete/modify specific partitions without affecting all the others on the drive...

I have resized OS X HFS+ partitions in the past using the Linux utility parted, so I could simply try that.

Maybe what I will try is backing up the system partition to an external/network drive using rsync, repartition the drive, then restore using rsync. I'm just not sure if this would cause any permission/bootability problems.

I would like to do this soon, since everything is already backed up, since I just switched hard drives.

I have no unix experience so I can't comment on the tools that may be available there. If you were to use Apple's Disk Utility then any messing about with the disk partitions will wipe everything. There is a very explicit warning if you were to embark on this course before you hit the format button. Backup everything before you do anything is a wise precaution for valuable data.

If you use a Linux utility to resize HFS+ volumes, you may find that these volumes are compatible with both the Mac OS X system software and Macintosh disk repair utilities, but are not compatible with Macintosh programs that alter or resize HFS+volumes, or with Apple’s Boot Camp. For an example, see this thread.