Partition Map Menu


Help Menu Window Menu View Menu Disk Menu Partition Menu Edit Menu iPartition Menu

Create Partition Map…

Creates a new partition map. You would use this option if you wanted to initialise a disk from scratch, or (for advanced users only) to construct a new partition map on a disk whose partition map had been destroyed.

Sort Partition Map

This operation only applies to Apple Partition Maps. After some operations, the entries in the partition map may be out of order; this option sorts the partition map by start block, so partitions that are physically located earlier on the disk will be located earlier in the partition map. There are also some known issues with some versions of Disk Utility where it will not display the partitions correctly if they are out of order. There is no requirement for partitions to be in start block order.

Expand Partition Map

This only applies to Apple Partition Maps. If the disk is larger than the partitioned area (for example, if you did an image copy of a smaller disk onto a larger one or if you added a disk to a RAID set), then selecting this command will increase the size of the partitioned area to match the size of the disk.

Change Partition Scheme…

Use this option to change the partition scheme. See Partition Schemes for more information.

Go

iPartition never executes commands immediately, instead queuing them up in its operations list (which you can see in the Operations panel). There are three main reasons for this:

  1. Operations can take some considerable time; iPartition’s operation queue means that you can issue a series of commands, then get on with something else whilst it works on your disk.
  2. It gives you the opportunity to think carefully about what at the end of the day is a relatively dangerous process. Accidentally deleting or formatting the wrong partition would be disastrous, but with iPartition you are able to cancel such operations right up until they start executing.
  3. It allows the user to experiment with their partition layout, or with the program, safe in the knowledge that there is no possibility of any harm coming to their data.

When you press this button, iPartition reminds you to check the warnings for the operations you are about to commit, to make sure that you are happy that you are doing the right thing.

You should treat this dialog as your last chance to abort; even though the progress display allows you to abort a sequence of operations, it does not let you stop an operation that is currently in-progress.

Note that if you cancel at this stage, abort from the progress sheet, or an operation fails, any operations that have not been executed will remain in the operations list. If you wish to remove those operations, you should open the Operations panel (by choosing Show Pending Operations, or by clicking the Operations button on the toolbar), and delete the operations as necessary.

(In the demonstration version, this option is disabled. The demonstration version will not commit operations to disk.)

Cancel All Pending Changes

Deletes all operations listed in the Operations panel.

Write MBR Boot Code

You should not normally need to use this; you might only need to do this if the MBR has become damaged and Windows no longer boots. The MBR is the first record on the disk and contains boot software that enables Windows to boot (this may change in future versions of Windows). Use this menu option to restore the correct boot code on your disk. Note that this option will write the default boot code that comes with Windows and may not work with other boot loaders that might be installed using third party software.