Tackle stubborn disk partitioning in OS X

Description

Generally, to partition and format a disk in OS X you open “Disk Utility”, select the disk in the tool’s sidebar and then click use the Partition tab to select and apply a partition scheme.  But, it may result in errors sometimes. In this tutorial, we are giving some ways to partition a drive using third-party tools. 

Solution:

By running "diskutil list" in the Terminal, you can use disk identifiers in commands as well as checking these locations in the command’s output. The first is the "fdisk" tool which is geared to manage DOS-formatted drives and used to initialize the drive with an MBR partition table. For this, open the Terminal and run following command:

fdisk -i -a hfs /dev/disk1

The second option is to use the "gpt" command (for managing GUID partition tables) so as to destroy the current GUID partition table on the device. For this, in the Terminal run the following command, again replacing "disk1" with the identifier for your drive:

gpt destroy /dev/disk1

These two commands allow you to overwrite the drive’s partition scheme as well as set it up again as a raw device in Disk Utility. If you still face problems while managing the drives with these then go for the below approaches:

Firstly, you can use random number generator device to overwrite the drive's contents. OS X accesses devices via enumerated node files located in the hidden /dev directory and for disks these files are called "disk0," "disk1," "disk2," etc. These can be used in commands. Further, the system also contains number of special nodes, one of which is classic "/dev/null" device. It accepts redirected text output from commands and does not save it to the console.

Additionally, there are random number generator/dev/random that will write random numbers in a string as long as it's accessed. The command for this:

cat /dev/random > /dev/disk1

Make sure to replace "disk0" with the appropriate drive identifier. This is helpful in clearing a stubborn CoreStorage setup on a drive.

Well, if the drive is an internal one and you are booted to it (normally, or to Apple's Recovery partition), then you can overcome partitioning obstructions by managing it as an external or secondary disk from another OS installation.

This is how you can tackle disk partitioning problems. For more from the XpertCrew^TM team, please follow us on Twitter @Techvedic or contact Techvedic’s computer support helpdesk, as per below contact-details:

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