How long should it take to create a new 80GB partition in my free space?

It shouldn't take very long...you probably dont have enough contiguous hard drive space.

oregon2 said:

I'm pretty sure I do, but what do you mean by contiguous? I used the slider in disk utility so that the new partition is taking up all my free space (but no more).

Click to expand...

To keep it simple say you have 30 "slots" to store data on your hard drive. When you save files they do not necessarily save right next to each other. That is to say that you have have one file in slot 2 and one in 8 and none in 5. Therefore simply because you have say 5 slots open does not mean that they are right next to each other. They could be slots 5, 9, 18, 25, and 30 for example. Also if you try to create a partition that is close to the entire amount of free space available you can have problems. The computer doesn't run well with only say a GB of hard drive space left over.

When I created a bootcamp partition, I had to free up almost 80Gb from my hard drive just to create a 20gb partition successfully. It takes time because it basically has to defragment the drive to make room for the partition. OS X is supposed to defrag automatically, but it doesn' do so with partitioning in mind (all free space at the end), and it won't work if you don't have enough free space (probably around 15-20% is required), and I don't think it works on large files. When you try to resize your partition it basically does a more comprehensive defrag, but a lot of free space might be needed to move everything around.

In my case I had to free up 80gb because they were all large video and VMWare files that were apparently taking up the space that was needed for the partition. If I had smaller files there, I could have gotten away with a lot less free space.