How to free some space so that I can use it for Windows?

[stanny]

I've currently got a Windows XP partition and a Mac partition. Thing is, I allocated too little to Windows XP, just about 20gb. I don't want to go through the hassle of installing the whole thing again so is it possible I free up some space in my Mac partition and just use some partition software in Windows to extend it's size?

 

[JediMeister]

You should not try to use any partitioning tools (such as Disk Utility in OS X, or Disk Management in Windows, or even Norton Partition Magic) to increase the size of your Boot Camp partition. If you want to try and avoid going through a whole reinstall, you can use Winclone to copy your Windows partition, use Boot Camp Assistant to delete and recreate the windows partition and use Winclone again to put the copy back to the up-sized Boot Camp partition.

 

[stanny]

Alright I am trying out WinClone. However, I've used disk utility to delete my Windows Partition. I then use Bootcamp Assistant to do what you say but it says I need to format my disk and restore it as a single Mac OS volume. I don't want to format my Mac partition.

 

[JediMeister]

Yuck, things just got a lot more complicated since you removed the Windows partition with Disk Utility rather than running Boot Camp Assistant again to reunify the hard drive. I doubt there's anyway to dodge a format of the drive, but you can avoid a reinstall by making a Time Machine backup of your OSX partition, booting to your Mac OS Install DVD, formatting the entire drive in Disk Utility, and then restoring OS X from Time Machine. Once you're done with that, re-run Boot Camp Assistant and use Winclone to put the backup of Windows onto the larger partition.