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ohla313

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 24, 2010
778
0
I am running 10.7.2 on a late 2011 MBA and realized I need more room on my Mac partition. How can I resize the Boot Camp partition to give my Mac side more room? Would I be able to use Disk Utility?

I am trying to decrease Boot Camp's partition and increase Mac's, to be clear.

Thank you!
 

steve&carl

macrumors newbie
Nov 27, 2011
2
0
How to Increase of Decrease the Size of Your BOOTCAMP Partition in Lion.

If you want to increase or decrease the HD space on your Boot Camp partition of Windows, this is how you do it for Mac OS X Lion for free. Below is a an overview of the steps that need to be taken.

a. Clone (Copy) your Window's BOOTCAMP to an external Hard Drive (HD) or to your computer if you have enough space.
b. Delete the Window's partition on your computer.
c. Repartition your computer to have the new size that you want.
d. Restore your old Window's BOOTCAMP data.

In more detail, I walk through the steps here:

1. Download the free software Winclone from Roaring Apps Website (yes Winclone still works for Lion).

http://roaringapps.com/app:904

2. Now you are ready to copy your partition. Install and open Winclone. Under the Image tab, choose the Source BOOTCAMP in the drop down menu. Then click Image… Save your BOOTCAMP Clone to an external HD or your computer if you have enough space.



This will take some time so be patient (between 1-3hrs). You can see your progress percentage by pressing Command-L.

You should now see a .winclone file in your external HD that is about the same size as your BOOTCAMP HD. If you are confident that you didn't interrupt the copying process turned off your computer halfway through then you can move onto the next step.

3. To delete the partition on your computer open Disk Utility (you can search for it in Spotlight). Click the top HD on the left hand side, then click the Partition tab, and highlight the BOOTCAMP partition.



Click the minus sign and click ok.

4. Download the Free Trial of Paragon NTFS 9.5 (It is for 10 days, but you delete it after you are done)

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/download.html

This will allow you to create NTSF partitions. Before in Snow Leopard, you could get the Boot Camp Assistant app to do this for you. However in Lion the Boot Camp Assistant now does not let you partition your drive without having a Window's disk inserted. So that is why I found this workaround.

Install the Paragon application. Then go back to Disk Utility. This time click the plus button, and name your partition BOOTCAMP. Resize the partition to be the new size that you want it to be.

***IMPORTANT: Beside "Format:" choose the format NTSF. Then click apply. MS-DOS (FAT) might work too if you don't want to install Paragon but I have not tried this. I chose NTSF because that is what the first Bootcamp used.

5. After the partitioning is completed. Open back up Winclone, click the restore tab. Beside Restore Image: select the .winclone file that you backed up previously, and click restore. This should also take a while (between 1-3hrs). Then you are done!
 

techmonkey

macrumors 6502a
Jun 8, 2007
596
0
What is the minimum size I can make the Lion partition? I would like to make as possible without any adverse effects.
 

Unit057

macrumors newbie
Jun 17, 2010
7
0
Australia
Hard Disk requirements

What is the minimum size I can make the Lion partition? I would like to make as possible without any adverse effects.

According to a few tech sources online, 7GB to 10GB of Hard Disk space is required for OS X Lion.

If the Hard Disk already has data on it, that totals higher than 10GB, (like if you have 10GB or more worth of stuff on OS X Lion) than leave at least 2GB more.

Example: You have 13GB of stuff on OS X Lion. Then, when partitioning, set the Macintosh HD to 15GB. This isn't required, just recommended.
 
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