Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

extend partition size on boot camp

E

evilzero

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 11, 2008
14
0
is it possible to extend my partition size on boot camp without re-formatting?
i'm on unibody macbook pro running 50gb of Windows 7, i'm running out of space right now and I'm thinking to extend it to 70-80gb to install more games on it. can this be done guys?
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

No but you can use Winclone to back up your partition use DU to reduce the size of your os x partition and then restore it.

There was a thread recently with detailed instructions.
 
thanks, but I read that people are having problems restoring windows 7 with winclone.. Is it fixed yet? I wanna know since i'm using win 7 myself..
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

If you have enough disk space you could just use Disk Utility to backup the NTFS partition as a DMG as a non resizeable fallback if you can't restore from Winclone.

B
 
cool, nice to hear that.. can't believe I went through lots of stuff from reformatting osx just to get bootcamp assistant to work.. restored my ntfs clone file to fat32 bootcamp partition and lost 20gb of my partition.. doing it over again now... :(
 
ok i think i'm doing something wrong here.. i restored my clone (50gb) to a new made partition (70gb).. but when i boot into windows, I still have 50gb of storage.. how do i get the new extended partition back? can someone tell me what i'm suppose to do?
 
evilzero said:
ok i think i'm doing something wrong here.. i restored my clone (50gb) to a new made partition (70gb).. but when i boot into windows, I still have 50gb of storage.. how do i get the new extended partition back? can someone tell me what i'm suppose to do?
Click to expand...

you didn't put the clone on the wrong partition did you?
 
Quad5Ny said:
I would have recommended a GParted Live CD, but you already messed around with Winclone.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php
Click to expand...

Well I guess that stands to reason if winclone uses ntfsprogs to do its stuff that the same capabilities should be in other packages!

I'd still use winclone to back things up (not generally a good idea to do major partition operations without a back up) but it does sound like gparted should do the trick.

Good to know!

B
 
Thanks, I'll give GParted a try next time.. bcoz winclone isn't as friendly as I thought, well it's windows os part to blame though.. been running checkdisk after restore... 13 hours so far and it's not even done.. you guys were right..
 
evilzero said:
Thanks, I'll give GParted a try next time.. bcoz winclone isn't as friendly as I thought, well it's windows os part to blame though.. been running checkdisk after restore... 13 hours so far and it's not even done.. you guys were right..
Click to expand...

Be really careful. Balamw is right, you should backup everything before you try to change partition sizes.

GParted isn't easy, but I was able to figure it out without reading any help documents(although I prob should have).

Good luck =)
 
There is/was an app for windows called Partition Magic. It would allow you to adjust your partition sizes without having to reformat. It worked awesome. All you had to do was, on the Mac side, contract your Mac partition; then boot back to windows and use this to expand your partition.

Ok it is still there and there are several others :

Partition Magic 8
Partition Manager
Disk Doctor Suite 10
gParted

The first three can be pricy, but the last one is free. I know what one I would try first the next time I need to do it. :D
 
Last I checked PM8 didn't understand GPT, so I would never use it on a Mac. Unless I knew for a fact that the drive was partitioned using MBR only.

I would be very leery of any similar product that did not explicitly call out GPT or Mac compatibility for the same reason.

I know there have been some issues with Acronis (makers of Disk Doctor 10) TrueImage and hybrid GPT/MBR partition tables such as Boot Camp is prone to use.

gparted is clearly designed for GPT and the price is right.

EDIT: CAREFUL! PM8 has not been updated since 2003. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PartitionMagic

EDIT2: DD10 is out as well, does not support GPT. http://kb.acronis.com/content/1827

EDIT3: Paragon Partition Manager 10 Professional claims GPT support and explicitly says that it supports Boot Camp, so it looks like a good solution!

B
 
CylonGlitch said:
There is/was an app for windows called Partition Magic. It would allow you to adjust your partition sizes without having to reformat. It worked awesome. All you had to do was, on the Mac side, contract your Mac partition; then boot back to windows and use this to expand your partition.

Ok it is still there and there are several others :

Partition Magic 8
Partition Manager
Disk Doctor Suite 10
gParted

The first three can be pricy, but the last one is free. I know what one I would try first the next time I need to do it. :D
Click to expand...

so you are saying all i have to do is shrink some partition on mac, then claim the partition in windows with one of those software? man... that sounds simple.. how come i never thought of that.. great stuff:D

Edit: so only PPM 10 is the only option for now i guess...
 
evilzero said:
Edit: so only PPM 10 is the only option for now i guess...
Click to expand...
Unless you are willing to try gparted.

It is good to know that PPM10 claims full Boot Camp support, especially if you can get it on sale cheaper than the full $80 price.

I still wouldn't resize it without a backup!

B
 
balamw said:
I still wouldn't resize it without a backup!
Click to expand...

Agreed!

Yes, when I used partition magic 8, it was nice enough to know it do anything with the Mac partitions thus you couldn't do anything if the drive was fully partitioned. So I just went into OSX and make the Mac partition smaller. Then partition magic saw the free space and was able to allocate it to the NTFS partition.

Oh, since it was my primary drive I had to boot off the install CD (tiger at the time) and adjust the primary partition that way -- it wouldn't let me make it smaller because it was the primary drive. I think this may have been fixed now.

Good luck. If I was going to do it over again, I would give gparted a try.
 
Paragon Solution

Hi All,

Paragon Software has a solution I think. I bought their NTFS for Mac and got a MacBrowser free, whihc doesn't install on Win 7 Pro 64 Bit for some reason.

But also downloaded a free item called Paragon Camptune...... I think it allows on the fly partition space management.

Check it out, and do tell me if I've got it all wrong !!

Regards

Preetinder
 
PreetinderBajwa said:
But also downloaded a free item called Paragon Camptune...... I think it allows on the fly partition space management.

Check it out, and do tell me if I've got it all wrong !!
Click to expand...
I don't think it's on the fly since they say:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/camptune/free_download.html said:
CampTune for Mac® OS X is an universal Linux-based bootable image that you can use on Apple Boot Camp. Before using this solution you have to burn it to any CD/DVD.
Click to expand...

So it's basically something like a gparted live CD.

It's also still in beta FWIW, but seems very promising down the line! (I still won't resize partitions without a backup! ;))

B
 
evilzero said:
ok i think i'm doing something wrong here.. i restored my clone (50gb) to a new made partition (70gb).. but when i boot into windows, I still have 50gb of storage.. how do i get the new extended partition back? can someone tell me what i'm suppose to do?
Click to expand...


I winclone, there is an option to expand the NTFS partition. This allows a smaller image (50gb in your case), to be expanded into a larger partition (70gb).
Just do winclone restore as normal then use this command. No access to winclone at the moment so don't know where it is but it works fine
 
evilzero said:
thanks, but I read that people are having problems restoring windows 7 with winclone.. Is it fixed yet? I wanna know since i'm using win 7 myself..
Click to expand...

Winclone is even having problems restoring Vista since SL. Not good at all. I can't even use my new 640GB HD!

Cheers,
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back