Resolved I can't resize my 2nd partition on my MacBook Pro

So I have my Mountain Lion partition, and my Mavericks one. I'm trying to make my Mavericks one slightly larger. The problem is Disk Utility in either version of OS X, and the recovery partition won't let me do it.

I can resize my Mountain Lion one, but then not my Mavericks?

Bear said:

You can only make a partition larger if there is space after the end of the partition. You cannot change the starting location of the partition without losing the data on it.

There may be third party utilities that can do that, but I'm not sure I would trust those.

And definitely have backups before re-sizing partitions. Actually, just always have current backups.

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Really?! Damn. Okay then. If anyone knows of an app that can do it, I'll give it a go. No problem doing that.

Dalton63841 said:

It's not a Mac limitation. It's the nature of how the partition tables are made. The only real way to do what you want would be to make an image of the second partition, put it somewhere safe, then delete the second partition and recreate it so that it includes all the now empty space, and restore the image back to it.

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Good idea. Thanks. So basically,

1. Resize the Macintosh HD
2. Add another partition, size it the way I want
3. Restore Mavericks to that
4. Delete Mavericks
4. Resize it to fill in the remaining space?

Oh god, that was a nightmare! You'd think you could do this all in the recovery disk utility, but it was a mix of booting into recovery, Mavericks, and Mountain Lion to do each step because my disk wouldn't unmount. Took like two hours, but I finally just finished.

Now I understand why reinstalls/upgrades never worked on my machine.

And yeah, I did it my way and just resized Mountain Lion, added a new partition, and then restored Mavericks to it, removed the 40GB one, and then resized the new 200GB one.