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Can't resize HFS+ partition

balamw

balamw

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Aug 16, 2005
19,366
979
New England
I've been helping someone out in the Windows on Mac forum and it's no longer a Windows on Mac issue. It's really a straight OS X issue at this point.

Basically the user is running 10.6.5 and has removed their Boot Camp partition, but is unable to grow their partition into the newly empty space.

I suggested that the user turn on journaling and try repairing the filesystem from the startup disc. Does anyone know of any other reasons why Disk Utility would not allow the partition to be resized dynamically?

The thread is here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1058958/

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zachsilvey

macrumors 6502
Feb 5, 2008
444
3
Battle Ground
In my experience this happens where there is less than 20% of the drive free.

I, personally, would just backup, reformat and reinstall OS X.
 
balamw

balamw

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Aug 16, 2005
19,366
979
New England
zachsilvey said:
In my experience this happens where there is less than 20% of the drive free.

I, personally, would just backup, reformat and reinstall OS X.
Click to expand...

Doesn't look like that's the case here according to the screenshot posted, it's mostly empty if anything.

I'd probably try CCC/SuperDuper off and back first, but yeah it's FUBAR.

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jdiamond

macrumors 6502a
Dec 17, 2008
699
535
IMO, the Mac's support of a boot camp partition is completely incompatible with normal file OS-X partition operations. At least as far as Leopard goes (I haven't tried it on Snow Leopard), if you create a boot camp partition AT ALL, you will never be able to resize partitions on that hard drive UNTIL you completely reformat it from scratch. Deleting the boot camp partition isn't enough, because it doesn't restore the volume to an OS-X friendly state.

So you'll have to copy the data to an external drive and format it. For me, the best tool on the planet for this is SuperDuper!, and for this use, the free version will work fine.

- Jeff
 
Z

zachsilvey

macrumors 6502
Feb 5, 2008
444
3
Battle Ground
jdiamond said:
IMO, the Mac's support of a boot camp partition is completely incompatible with normal file OS-X partition operations. At least as far as Leopard goes (I haven't tried it on Snow Leopard), if you create a boot camp partition AT ALL, you will never be able to resize partitions on that hard drive UNTIL you completely reformat it from scratch. Deleting the boot camp partition isn't enough, because it doesn't restore the volume to an OS-X friendly state.

So you'll have to copy the data to an external drive and format it. For me, the best tool on the planet for this is SuperDuper!, and for this use, the free version will work fine.

- Jeff
Click to expand...

I have been able to remove and resize the partition but you must use the BootCamp assistant. If you used disk utility to remove the windows partition you begin having problems.
 
balamw

balamw

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Aug 16, 2005
19,366
979
New England
zachsilvey said:
I have been able to remove and resize the partition but you must use the BootCamp assistant. If you used disk utility to remove the windows partition you begin having problems.
Click to expand...

Odd. I've been able to go the other way (shrinking the OS X partition to increase the Windows one, deleting the old Windows partition and making a new one in Disk Utility) on several of my Macs without issues. I wonder what is going on when you manually remove the Boot Camp partition that is causing this?

Wonder if it may just be that the GPT and MBR partition tables are out of sync.

Said user has been all over the place creating and replacing partitions so the partition map is probably a mess.
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