Hi all. I have a Windows XP Partition on my Macbook, which the genius's at my college IT department decided at the time it was made to split my hard drive 50:50 despite telling them I only need the Windows partition for documents. I've been noticing OSX running a bit slow of late and yesterday my hard drive finally reached capacity. I have well over 100 GB free on the Windows side so I need to free up some of this space. I'm just wondering whats the safest/ best way to go about this. I don't have a Windows install disc for a clean install so that's not an option. I just need to backup the current partition and make the Window's partition smaller in Bootcamp. I have all my college documents on the XP partition so I need something reliable as I can't afford to lose them. What's the best/ most reliable programme to get this done? I'm running OSX 10.6.8. Thanks in advance for any advice given.
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Safest way to make Windows Partition smaller
- Thread starter Skerryman
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The safest and most reliable way is to backup your windows system first. Backup mac os x also.
Use bootcamp assistant and remove the existing partition.
Reboot and make sure everything is ok in your mac os x world.
Use bootcamp assistant and recreate a smaller appropriate partition size.
Reinstall into your re-sized partition windows and software and recover any documents etc that you backed up.
Doing it any other way starts getting tricky and risky and may produce unstable configurations unfortunately.
Thanks for the reply. I've been doing a bit of looking and Winclone seems to pop up a lot as a method to backup my Windows partition. Is this a good option or is there anything else I should be looking at. I'm presuming Winclone and the likes will make a back up of XP including any programmes and documents I have.
People around here seem to like it but I have never used it ... so no opinion. You definitely want some kind of strategy.
Ghost 15 works well on xp and win 7 and if I were hacking around the XP world I would think about using that.
I have tried Winclone, but have never been able to get it to work. It seems to create the image successfully (or at least it tells you it has) but then restoring the image to a BootCamp partition fails.
I've always wasted more time trying to get it to work than it takes to just do a clean install of Windows, apps and data files.
I also remember reading somewhere on the forums that Winclone is not compatible with Lion.
If you are going to try Winclone or any other imaging product, I would make sure you have a backup of all your data files somewhere in case it doesn't work and you have to do a clean install.
I've made an image with Winclone (also backed files up manually to an external harddrive). Took a few goes but it finally did it. I then removed my bootcamp partition, after which I had to resize the Macintosh HD to 100%. This is where I ran into trouble. When I try to resize the macintosh HD I get an error which says "Could not modify partition map because filesystem verification failed". I've googled around a bit and I think I need to run Disk Utility from the startup disk to get around this (at least I'm hoping this works). Don't have the disc with me so will have to try tomorrow. If anyone else knows a solution to this any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks
A little confused here ... you coulda ( and probably shoulda ) removed the bootcamp partition by using the bootcamp assistant. First you take it out ... then re-create it ... all using bootcamp assistant. ( Being cautious I would take it out first, reboot, check everything etc ... before re-creating it ).
Did you remove it yourself somehow not using bootcamp assistant? If so that's probably where you got into trouble ...
Winclone support stopped quite some time ago and does not work really good under the latest versions of Snow Leopard or under Lion.
If you have a good backup / restore method then you may want to take a look at Paragon Partition Manager under Windows - I managed to resize with that without having to resort to reinstall.
If you have a good backup / restore method then you may want to take a look at Paragon Partition Manager under Windows - I managed to resize with that without having to resort to reinstall.
I was going by a Youtube tutorial where the guy deleted the partition in Disk Utility. He then used Disk Utility to resize Mac partition to 100%. After this he used Bootcamp assistant to make a new partition. Although I've come across some sites that say to do it as you've mentioned above. Damn it. Any idea's? I'm hoping booting from the disk will help. Step 5 in the link below mentions the same error and says booting from the disc will fix it, fingers crossed. I'm using Snow Leopard but Winclone seems to have done the backup OK, its just re-partitioning that's causing me hassle.
http://think2loud.com/882-how-to-split-your-mac-hard-drive-into-2-partitions/
Unlike with OS X filesystem where you have live partitioning where you can resize without destroying it but with window.... you would have to remove/delete and destroy the window partition using the bootcamp Assistant and recreate the window partition in order to change the size.
Another problem is that boot camp Assistant may not be able recreate partition. To solve that problem you would have wipe out the entire disk and re install OS X on single partition and then use bootcamp Assistant to recreate the partition.
Another problem is that boot camp Assistant may not be able recreate partition. To solve that problem you would have wipe out the entire disk and re install OS X on single partition and then use bootcamp Assistant to recreate the partition.
Finally got it sorted. Booted from the Snow Leopard Disc and repaired the disc from there. This then allowed me to successfully resize the OSX partition to 100% before going into Bootcamp Assistant and resizing the Windows partition to free up space on OSX. I then restored the XP clone onto my bootcamp partition from the copy I made using Winclone. I know have an extra 100GB of space to use as I wish in OSX so it was worth the hassle in the end. Thanks for all the replies 