Comments on: Live partition resizing & Boot camp

By: R Hyre

R Hyre — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 04:02:22 +0000

Oddly enough, you have to use Linux partitioning tools on PPC Macs to resize the Apple Partition Map partitions. However, this works pretty well, I’ve done it on my Mac Mini and ancient iBook to dynamically resize partitions.

Any word on when PPC and other linuxen will fully grok the GUID partition tables? I’d prefer to do live resizes with one utility, to avoid ‘pilot error’ in the future.

By: envie

envie — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 22:42:29 +0000

Can the resizeVolume command be used in 10.4.11? I looked at the man page for diskutil and it does not mention this funcationality…

By: bbum

bbum — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 17:35:04 +0000

Sounds like a bug in Ghost — it sounds like it is restoring the partition info instead of laying down the partition contents into the newly sized partition.

When doing things like this, I usually use the command line tool ‘asr’ or Disk Utility to save off the contents of the partition and later restore.

By: eyk

eyk — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 17:29:40 +0000

hey all, i recently installed vista on a bootcamp partition. I realized after the fact that it was too small, so I backed up the partition using Symantec Ghost 12.0. I then went into OSX, removed the bootcamp partition, and then created a new one using bootcamp. Before restoring the partition, the OSX disk utility GUI read the partition as the correct (40GB) size. After restoring the Ghost image, the disk utility now reads the old size of 20GB. Does anyone know what’s going on? It is interfering with VMWare Fusion’s ability to mount the bootcamp partition from within OSX because it is (probably) looking for it at the wrong part of the disk… Any help would be appreciated!

Cheers,

eyk

By: Matthew Johnson

Matthew Johnson — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 22:34:06 +0000

Can this safely be used on the current system partition? I am thinking of signing up for the Leopard Technology Preview and would like to partition the system drive on my PowerBook to create a place to install Leopard. If I can’t do so while booted into the PowerBook, could I connect it to my new iMac in FireWire disk mode and do this?

Thanks for your help!

Matthew

By: Fast Miso » Mac OS X, Live partitioning and we with PowerPCs

Fast Miso » Mac OS X, Live partitioning and we with PowerPCs — Fri, 05 May 2006 01:53:22 +0000

[...] The other day my friend’s laptop hard drive was dying. He need to back up his disk to his external drive (which should be done with everyone’s best friend Carbon Copy Cloner) but he didn’t have a separate partition to keep things tidy in the process. Everyone has been talking about OS X 10.4.6’s new resizeVolume option to the diskutil command, but few articles actually mention that, while the option exists on the PowerPC 10.4.6 version of diskutil, you can’t actually use it on a PowerPC, as far as I can tell. The different is that Intel-based Macs (Macintels) have a GUID Partition Table while PowerPC-based Macs use Apple Partition Map (APM). You can only resizeVolume if the volume is GUID, that is, Intel-based. [...]

By: bbum’s weblog-o-mat » Blog Archive » Mac OS X live partitioning example

Thu, 04 May 2006 07:13:21 +0000

[...] What a perfect time to use 10.4.6’s resizeVolume to make myself a new boot partition. [...]

By: macmd

macmd — Wed, 03 May 2006 09:35:41 +0000

I’ve been looking at this for the same reason as IAn. But strangly there is no geek out there that has tried a re-partition on a complete OS X/XP setup that they wan’t to redistribute. Is there anyone out there that has taken the plunge?

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 19:38:36 +0000

So I just got myself a MacBook Pro and am attempting to make this work, with no success so far. I’m an old school Unix guru, so I’m very particular about how I partition my machine to work best with Unix. I currently use a 5 partition scheme:

swap 1G
system 10G
apps 15G
users 15G
scratch 45G (this partition is whatever is left in space and used for all downloading, coding, music, movies, etc - basically anything that changes often on disk)

From what I have read above, it looks like for BootCamp it would need to become 6 partitions as follows:

swap 1G
system 10G
WINDOZE 10G
apps 15G
users 15G
scratch 45G

Is this correct? If so, what am I doing wrong. I partitioned the drive like this, first using Disk Utility (which does let you select MS-DOS as a partition type when doing the partitioning) and secondly with ‘diskutil’ which is on the install DVD. In both cases I got the same results. If I try to run BootCamp Assistant which the disk already partitioned, it just comes up with an error saying that it will only work if the disk is a single MacOS partition, then quits. So, fine, I just went ahead and booted from my XP install CD to just do an install. When it comes up with it’s list of “drives” to install onto, I get a C: drive. But it says that it can’t install XP on that partition unless I “delete” the partition and reformat it from the XP installer. I stupidly did try this before I realized that that C: drive was the size of my entire hard disk and when I deleted it, my whole hard drive was wiped out and I had to start over. This isn’t a big deal because this is a brand new machine and I still have my old one. So I can reinstall as many times as I need to and still have all my data. But I’d like to get this squared away now before I start using the machine on a regular basis.

Any suggestions?

By: IAn

IAn — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 20:27:29 +0000

this is a foreign language to me…if anyone could help me out i would greatly appreciate it - i’ve already partitioned my macbook…foolishly only giving 5GB to windows. i’d like to increase this to around 10GB but havent been able to figure out how without going through the entire process over again. any info would be great - thanks - inf327@yahoo.com