See Protect your Mac information with encryption. Steps to partition a hard drive on Mac partition hard drive with boot camp assistant Tap on the View button and choose Show All Devices. You can also encrypt a disk and protect it with a password without erasing it. Connect the power adapter and then turn the Mac on. On the built-in keyboard, press and hold the Shift + Option + Control keys on the left side and press the power button and hold all of these down for 10 seconds. You can encrypt your data without erasing it by turning on FileVault in Privacy & Security settings (see Encrypt Mac data with FileVault). Shut down and unplug the power adapter on your Mac. I was using a 1.5 TB external drive with my Mac, but never really used more than 1/4 of the space. If the Security Options button is not available, you can’t use Disk Utility to perform a secure erase on the storage device. If you have a large external hard drive, you can easily partition it so that the entire drive gets utilized. Secure erase options are available only for some types of storage devices. (Optional) If available, click Security Options, use the slider to choose how many times to write over the erased data, then click OK.

How to Format or Partition a Drive on Mac OSX 10.9.x (Mavericks) and 10.10.x. To change the password later, select the volume in the sidebar, then choose File > Change Password. From the left Column chose the External drive (My Passport, My Book, etc.

In the sidebar, select the storage device you want to encrypt.Ĭlick the Scheme pop-up menu, then choose GUID Partition Map.Ĭlick the Format pop-up menu, then choose an encrypted file system format.Įnter and verify a password, then click Choose. If Disk Utility isn’t open, click the Launchpad icon in the Dock, type Disk Utility in the Search field, then click the Disk Utility icon. In the Disk Utility app on your Mac, choose View > Show All Devices. If the device contains any files you want to save, copy them to another storage device or volume.

Partition external drive mac