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Creating small partitions with Disk Utility (or not) on 2012 iMac

T

The Phazer

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Oct 31, 2007
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Has anyone else tried to create a small partition on a Fusion Drive on a 2012 Mac?

Disk Utility greys out the box to set my own file size, only allowing me to drag the graphic to set the size of the new partitions. This results in the smallest partition allowed of 67GB. Post paritioning, it actually achieves a partition of 120+ Gigs.

That's crazy. I only need it to hold 100MB of files.

Is everyone else finding the same thing? Anyone got any suggestions or has anyone found a third party tool that non-destructively allows you to create a partition on a Fusion Drive?
 
T

The Phazer

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hfg said:
If you read further down on that same thread, there is an alternate method of installing Windows to an external drive which does not require any modifications to your OS X drive (Fusion or not).

See post #47 there.
Click to expand...

I don't have access to an existing 64 bit Windows machine in order to do it, sadly.
 
T

The Phazer

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Actually, having thought about it a bit more... Could I use that method by creating a normal boot camp installation with an unactivated 64 bit copy of Windows (the evaluation copy would presumably work) on the hard drive and just vape it after getting Windows 8 on the SSD?

I actually have managed to use terminal commands to create the small partition now, but it still seems to have sacrificed far more HD space that it should have done.
 
hfg

hfg

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The Phazer said:
I don't have access to an existing 64 bit Windows machine in order to do it, sadly.
Click to expand...

I was able to use a VMware Fusion virtual Windows 7 installation to perform the drive preparations. I did not have access to a true Windows PC either.

I was able to get that method of creating an external Windows SSD working. However I am not using it currently because I was unable to get my VMware Fusion virtual Windows to locate the bootable external drive and install the VM to that image, probably because it wasn't in the OS X boot manager. I really like to have a single Windows installation which I can access either as a virtual machine from OS X, or as a bootable OS for games.

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The Phazer said:
Actually, having thought about it a bit more... Could I use that method by creating a normal boot camp installation with an unactivated 64 bit copy of Windows (the evaluation copy would presumably work) on the hard drive and just vape it after getting Windows 8 on the SSD?

I actually have managed to use terminal commands to create the small partition now, but it still seems to have sacrificed far more HD space that it should have done.
Click to expand...

That would probably work, however you will probably have to delete "vape :) " that image before you will be able to complete the installation on the external drive.

When I tried that, I could see either Windows boot-option at startup, but whichever one I selected always seemed to end up running my existing BootCamp partition, rather than the external drive. Moving the external Thunderbolt drive to a computer that didn't have a Windows BootCamp installation allowed the prepped drive to complete the installation and it ran normally.
 
T

The Phazer

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Original poster
Oct 31, 2007
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London, UK
Just to confirm, this did work (I deleted the boot camp partition after copying over the image but before installing, as suggested).

I had a few issues getting the boot sector to copy over from the image as per the link - it didn't seem to like being connected via Thunderbolt, but I switched it to USB3 and it worked fine, and then switched back to using a Thunderbolt cable.
 
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