Having learned the hard way not to create the Install DVD partition before everything else on my drive, I've repartitioned my external HDD with a 6GB partition at the end. It's a 160GB drive, with a 50GB for Leopard, another 50 for Time Machine, however much else for general storage, and a 6GB partition for the Install DVD at the end. My original plan was to delete the 6GB partition after installation and merge that resulting space into the storage partition with diskutil resizeVolume.

But.

I can't actually figure out how to delete a partition, leaving only free space behind. Disk Utility is useless in that aspect, and none of the diskutil commands give about twelve different formats but no "Free Space".

I discovered that I can't delete the partition in Vista, because even though it supports GPT it fuxored everything else on the drive.

So yeah... is there any way I can syntax a diskutil command to remove a partition without actually formatting it? I can take it from there on resizing the storage partition.

only thing that comes to mind is using ipartition, or drive genius, i think both of those have non destructive partitioning, but i don't know about diskutil commands

iPartition does not work in leopard....I almost lost a lot of data a few months ago.

However, it comes with a free util to make a bootable CD...and that works flawlessly

Yeah, but do I have to pay for the full version in order to get the bootable CD utility? I'm a bit averse to spending money right now.

Well, I do have to say that the devs of that app are very nice and deserve that money. When I almost lost my data, one of them worked with me for 3 hours to help me restore. He even VNCed into my mac for a bit. And he put all of this effort into it knowing that I was using an unsupported OS beta

Wow. Good tech support is becoming a rarity these days; it's nice to see there's some of it still out there.
On second thought, I might spend the $ for this app. It's like $15, right?

yeah, really cheap, i bought it, and it is very helpful, becuase there arn't that many non-destructive partitioning apps out there

here is it from the actuallt maker, but maybe ebay or something will have it for cheaper

Use diskutil in terminal

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/D...diskutil.8.html

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/D...doc/man/8/fdisk

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/D...doc/man/8/pdisk

VolumeWorks and DiskStudio reproted as working, both on oink

I don't think diskutil in Terminal can simply destroy a partition, e.g. create free space with NO filesystem whatsoever. Nor can it non-destructively merge two partitions. I need(ed) to destroy the partition so I could extend another partition into the resulting free space.

In the end, I paid for iPartition and ran it in my Tiger system. Deleted the offending Install DVD partition on the USB drive and extended my general storage partition into the resulting space.