Adding Fat32 partition to startup volume

[Hewenuschalom]

Hi everyody,

I am currently in the process of creating a 30gb Fat32 partition on my macbook pro. And it has been running for two hours already, which is making me quite anxious, as the screen is frozen at the same time. The mouse cursor can still be moved, however everything else is frozen. Even the clock has been frozen.
Disk utility does inform you about freezing the screen if you apply changes to the startup volume, however I did not expect it to take this long...

So can anybody tell me whether this is normal? Or is it due to the fact that my ssd is encrypted? Or did everything break? Or......what can I do?

Anyway thanks for all possible help.


Some infos:
Using disk utility I went the standard route of simply selecting macintosh Hd and then click on partition. Then I selected size and format of the partition and went on to apply the changes.
I am running this on a Macbook Pro Retina - early 2015/macos 10.13/256gb.
The ssd is encrypted, and this is the first time I‘m applying changes to the main volume.

 

[Hewenuschalom]

Or putting this in another way...can I abort the process?
It‘s been going on for six hours now and there is no sign of it doing anything. It sounds like the computer is just idle. At the same time I am afraid of breaking the whole system.

So any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[h9826790]

I suggest you plug in the power and leave it overnight.

From your description, it seems only force shutdown can abort the process. However force shutdown during any partition operation is definitely not a good idea. I think at least leave it overnight. SSD is good, but in this case, you can't hear it at all. So, no idea if it's doing anything.

I never encrypt my hard drive. But from other members' posts, it seems every time need to do anything on a encrypted hard drive / partition. It can take a long time to finish.

I have no idea what really need to be done in your case. But if the OS need to un-encrypt the whole SSD, and then move the data around to free up 30GB continuous free space. And then re-encrypt the whole partition again. It is possible need many hours to finish.

 

[Hewenuschalom]

Yeah I‘ve done that now. It‘s officially been 24 hours still nothing seemingly happening...

Does anybody have any idea?

 

[Weaselboy]

Or is it due to the fact that my ssd is encrypted?

That is the problem. You cannot resize an encrypted boot volume like that. Just restart, turn off FileVault and wait for it to unencrypt, then resize and add your FAT32 partition. Then turn FV back on.