Backups without making this kind of mistake?

[doofmaczemy]

Sure,
it's just that i have a useless windows (unmounted) partition that i cant get rid of.. I'd rather get rid of that first, before mucking about.

Supposedly, you have to go out and buy special software to erase partitions..
Well, I don't like the idea of creating a partition if one has to erase everything on the hard drive just to get rid of the partition. (or buy the software)
(BTW i don't feel that informed on this subject, or maybe I have just
been misinformed.)

[dnanian]

I understand. You don't have to purchase special software to get rid of partitions: Disk Utility can do it. In Leopard, in most situations, it can supposedly do so without data loss, although this isn't something I've tried. Regardless, if you have a bad partition that's set up for windows, you can always simply reformat that partition for the Mac and move to the files there, no?

[doofmaczemy]

Different partitions can be reformatted independent of each other?
Don't you have to reformat the entire drive to get that done?

From what I understand, once you reformat something, you
erase everything in/on it.

[dnanian]

No, erasing a single partition doesn't touch the rest of the drive.

[doofmaczemy]

you mean using... Disk Utility?

[dnanian]

Yes: using the Erase function in Disk Utility, and "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" as the format -- that does a single partition, not the whole drive (unless, of course, you select the whole drive).