Boot Camp/Fusion space issue

[suecd]

Hi--

When I got my MacBook 1 1/2 years ago, I made a Boot Camp partition that I thought was 32 gigs to use with Fusion. I'm not doing much on Windows, but all my financial stuff is on MS Money, so I needed to have a way to access it. Over time, it seemed that the partition was getting smaller. Although (I thought) I'd allocated 32 gigs, the Windows partition was only 5.9 gigs, and I only had a few hundred MBs of that to work with, and Windows is constantly telling me I'm running out of space. So, I've been trying to figure out how to expand the partition.

I used Winclone successfully . . . except that because my Windows partition was formatted in FAT32, it went back to the original size of 5.9 gigs. Then, I followed the instructions to boot into the Windows HD and convert it, but when I went to do that, nothing happened. (I clicked on the Windows HD, and the screen went blank.) After that, I resigned myself to re-installing Windows and making the conversion then. The XP CD went through the whole set up and then said there was a disk error and wouldn't do anything.

I don't know what to do next. I have my xp partition back up, via Winclone, but I still have no space. I'm not that computer savvy, and I don't want to keep messing with it, but the current setup isn't sustainable. Any thoughts would be welcome.

Thanks,
Sue

 

[JNB]

I'm not sure why the partition would be decreasing in size, there's something missing in your description to accurately determine what you're seeing vs. what's happening.

WinClone will only use/report the actual amount of space used, not an entire partition. You could have a 60GB partition, but if the entire Windows instance took only, say, 6GB of that, that's all WinClone will need for the clone size.

Since you can't dynamically resize a BC partition, re-run the Boot Camp Assistant and revert the Windows partition to all Mac. Then, run it again and recreate the BC partition to the size you desire. Restore the clone to the new partition.

There are Windows tools that allow for converting a live FAT32 environment to NTFS, but unless you're having problems because of the filesystem type, I don't see a need to convert for its own sake.

 

[suecd]

Thanks, JNB. I don't get what's going on with the space, is part of the problem (and I can't remember exactly how big the original partition was, though definitely 32 gigs or less b/c it's FAT 32). After I made the Winclone image, I re-partitioned the hard drive. It's a 160 gig HD, and at that point, (before I re-partitioned it) there were 140 or so gigs on the Mac side, which indicates that my Windows partition was a lot smaller than 32 gigs. So, I alloted 20 to Windows and the rest to the Mac, but after I restored the Winclone image, the size of the Windows HD was back to 5.9 gigs, what it had been before. I basically did the whole thing again and this time gave the Windows partition 25 gigs, but it still only shows 5.9 gigs. Several things I read said that if your files are in FAT 32, when you restore the image it will revert to the original size, and that's why I tried, unsuccessfully, to convert it to NTFS. So, given that Windows wouldn't boot in bootcamp and then given that there was a disk failure when I tried to install XP again, I'm not sure what to do next.