Whether you are a Mac user or Windows, having more than one hard disk partition is always recommended. That’s because if you ever end up messing the macOS, you can have your important files saved on the second partition. You can quickly restore the macOS without losing any data. It hardly takes a few minutes to create a hard drive partition on Mac.

You’ll Be Using A Piece Of Software Called Disk Utility. Software that is part of your Mac’s operating.

There is a built-in application on Mac called “Disk Utility,” but there are also some third-party partition manager apps that make the task a lot easier. Besides that, if you have Time Machine backup enabled, you have to keep it safe. You can attach an external HDD and create an exclusive partition for Time Machine backups. Even if you end up a corrupted Mac, you can restore it as new and then use your Time Machine backup to get things back.

Anyways, if you are new to this partitioning thing, follow this tutorial to partition a hard drive on mac.

How to Create a Hard Disk Partition in MacOS

Note: If you are creating a partition of your primary hard drive on Mac, make sure you close all other application. It is not mandatory but recommended for safety reasons.

Step #1. Open Disk Utility app on your Mac. You can either use the Launchpad from Dock or Spotlight search to find it.

Just like Windows, it also provides a seamless solution to partition hard drive on Mac or un-partition it as well. Mac has a dedicated Disk Utility feature that allows us to manage the hard disk (Macintosh HD) pretty easily. In this post, we will cover the same and teach you how to partition a hard drive on Mac like a pro!
Solution 3: Create One HFS+ Partition for Mac and One NTFS Partition for Windows. Alternatively, you can create 2 partitions on the external hard drive: one is for Mac, and the other is for Windows. As to size for each partition, it depends on your own demands. By this way, you can easily format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows.
The Windows setup will display the currently available drives and partitions that Windows can be installed on. Because the external hard drive has been assigned to the VirtualBox machine, it is the only drive that will be listed. When we used Disk Utility to format the drive, we chose MS-DOS (FAT), which is incompatible with Windows 10.
From within Mac OS X Lion: To restart your MacBook in Windows, click System Preferences in the Dock and click the Startup Disk icon to display the settings you see here. Click the Windows partition you created in the list to select it (the folder icon will bear the Windows logo, and it will be labeled Windows as well). Click Restart, and then click Restart again when asked for confirmation.

Step #2. Now click on the Hard Drive from the left menu and then click on Partition at the top.

Note that you have to click on Hard Drive and not the partitions if you have any.

Step #3. Your drive will be displayed as a pie chart on the left. Right below the pie chart, there’s a “+” Click on it.

Step #4. At the next screen, name the partition if you wish to and then, enter the size of the partition. Make sure you keep enough space for the macOS and not shrink it too small. Now click on “Apply” at the bottom-right.

Step #5. At the pop-up, click on “Partition.” You’ll get one more pop-up, click on “Continue.”

That’s it. The partitioning process will begin immediately. As said earlier, make sure you have closed all your apps to make sure there is no data loss or corruption issue.

The process of partitioning may take some time depending on the size of the partition. Also, your Mac may become unresponsive, don’t panic. After the process is completed, you can click “Done” and head over to Finder app to check the newly created partition.

Wrapping up

Partitions are a great way to keep your data organized. But a thing to note here is that the boot partition should have at least 100GB of space to store cache files. Even though the Mac doesn’t use that much of the space, but it surely affects the performance of your PC experience.

Don’t miss:

What partition structure you have set on your Mac? And why? Share your recommendations for other users by commenting below.

The founder of iGeeksBlog, Dhvanesh, is an Apple aficionado, who cannot stand even a slight innuendo about Apple products. He dons the cap of editor-in-chief to make sure that articles match the quality standard before they are published.

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This Tech-Recipe will show you how to MANUALLY modify an existing Mac hard disk to allow a Windows installation. Have you ever wanted to know what’s under the hood when you run the Boot Camp wizard? Ever wanted to modify a Mac GPT disk with an existing HFS+ partition to allow a Windows installation to occur without having to boot from the destination disk to begin with (“Target Disk Mode”)? Read on…

The essence of an Intel-based Mac is the new firmware and disk partitioning scheme. This is nothing new to most, but many folks who are interested in running Windows on their Mac still do not know how it works.

A classic x86 (PC) machine uses Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) with a Master Boot Record formatted disk. An Intel-based Mac uses Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) with a GUID Partition Table (GPT) formatted disk. Intel developed the latter for use with Itanium-based systems, but if you’re interested in a more elaborate explanation please look here:

A GPT formatted disk does not contain a “real” Master Boot Record. Current Windows Operating Systems require a Master Boot Record formatted disk (one that accurately references all partitions using MBR) to boot from. The GPT specification requires that the first 512 bytes of a disk be reserved as a place-holder, essentially containing an MBR that simply indicates one partition which occupies the whole disk, where a traditional MBR disk usually locates its partition table and boot code. Apple utilizes their diskutil application to create an MBR on a GPT formatted disk, thus allowing Windows to install and boot. The Boot Camp utility simply uses this utility “under the hood” to make this easy for the average user.

Let’s take an average Intel-based Mac, running with a single hard disk formatted as a GPT disk (the default). Open Terminal, and run fdisk on the boot disk (normally /dev/rdisk0) to see the MBR. It will show you an effectively “empty” partition table:

sudo fdisk /dev/rdisk0

Running the above command on a machine that does not contain a “Boot Camp” partition will result in a listing of an effectively empty disk. This will differ greatly from the output of the following command:

diskutil list

Which will list the currently mounted disks and their respective partitions and filesystems. You’ll probably note that you seem to have two partitions, even though you only have one that is usable. The first partition, all ~200MB of it, is actually used by EFI and is not really “usable” space. A further elaboration of the details of any given partition can be had with a command such as the following (this example for partition #2, the boot partition, on the average Mac):

diskutil info /dev/disk0s2

Which will list many useful details, including “Bootable” status and free space. If you wish to create a “Boot Camp” partition from which to boot Windows you’ll really be creating a third partition on your GPT disk, using some of your available free space, and then creating a Master Boot Record to allow Windows to reference and boot from said partition.

In my case, my November 2007 MacBook Pro has an aftermarket 320GB Western Digital 7200 RPM “Black Edition” hard disk. Having approximately 120GB in use, that leaves usable free space of about 200GB. I wanted about 70GB for Windows, so I ran the following in Terminal:

diskutil resizevolume /dev/disk0s2 250G MS-DOS “Win7” 65G

This command uses the d

Manual Partition Mac Hard Drive To Run Windows