The big blue circle indicates the Fusion Drive in this iMac, and there’s currently just one partition and logical volume that makes up the whole of the drive - Macintosh HD, at 2.12 TB. With the drive (not the volume) selected, clicking on the Partition button displays this window: (Disk Utility, with the Partition button highlighted)Īs you can see above, I’ve gone ahead and clicked on the drive named “Fusion Drive” - it’s currently partitioned into one big volume called “Macintosh HD”. If it’s not currently highlighted, it’s because Disk Utility usually shows the current Mac volume information, not the Mac disk information.

The partition tool is one of six buttons at the top of the Disk Utility window (see image below). Or, since you’re running macOS Sierra, you can just click on the Siri icon and say “Launch Disk Utility”. Next, there’s a keyboard shortcut to get to the Utilities folder - Command + Shift + U from the Finder. First, one can go to Finder > Go > Utilities, then double-click on the Disk Utility icon. During the macOS Sierra beta, my “test machine” was partitioned with Mac OS X El Capitan on one partition and macOS Sierra beta on another.ĭisk Utility can be launched several different ways.

Running beta operating systems in their own boot partition.

At startup, it’s possible to select which operating system is to be loaded. When using Apple’s Boot Camp environment, two partitions are set up - one for macOS, the other for Microsoft Windows.

Creating a multi-boot setup, with different operating systems on the same computer.

Separating macOS and application files from user files, which means that clones of the operating system and apps can be made separate of the documents created by the Mac.

So why would you want to divide a drive into two or more partitions? Partitioning is usually done before installation of an operating system in most cases, Apple and other computer manufacturers tend to leave the drive as one big partition. Partitioning a drive essentially breaks it up into distinct, named regions so that an operating system like macOS can manage information in each of those regions separately.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how to partition and erase drives using macOS Sierra’s updated Disk Utility. While we got into the details of how to verify or repair disks using Disk Utility, we didn’t cover the new partitioning tool. At the end of September, the Rocket Yard gave you the scoop on the new version of Disk Utility that is now in macOS Sierra.

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