Problem enabling journaling in order to resize partitions on an external drive (Mac)

Solution 1:

Note that if you do:

diskutil disableJournal disk1s2

and you get:

An error occurred journaling the file system: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-69860)

the journaling is in fact disabled. The error is bogus. Eject and remount, and you'll see journaling is now off. Does knowing this help you?

Solution 2:

I had a similar problem with a 1TB external drive that I needed to format from NTFS to OS X (journaled). Nothing I did got me past the error that the single 1TB partition could not be resized since journaling was not enabled. What the Disk Utility help does not tell you is that journaling will not actually be turned on until you have ejected (not just dismounted) and reconnected the drive.