Need Some Disk Utility Assistance Partitioning

[LarryJoe33]

This question could probably be posted in MacOS, but I am using High Sierra and Disk Utility.

For the life of me, I just can't seem to get my partition sizes the way I would like. It's like I move the size of one and the wrong one changes. It took me more time than I would have thought to get the partitions the way they are below and they still aren't what I want. It would be great if someone could take me to school. I simply want to take some space from "Sierra" and add some space to "High Sierra". What's the best approach without losing data?

 

[mikecwest]

Can you just click on each partition, manually type in the size on the right and click apply?

You can also down load a free trial of Paragon Partition Manager, and do it with that. ( I don't think it supports APFS yet though)

 

[LarryJoe33]

Can you just click on each partition, manually type in the size on the right and click apply?

You can also down load a free trial of Paragon Partition Manager, and do it with that. ( I don't think it supports APFS yet though)

Thanks. For the life of me, I can't get the 150GB High Sierra to 180GB. I type it in and it reverts to 150GB. I did some research and there is some limitations of the partition you are tryin to resize based on the size of the one next to it. I get that, but Sierra has plenty of room to spare. I can shrink Sierra, but it creates a new partition. In fact, any adjustment it will let me make results in a new untitled partition. I wish I could just drag the pie slices.

 

[mikecwest]

Thanks. For the life of me, I can't get the 150GB High Sierra to 180GB. I type it in and it reverts to 150GB. I did some research and there is some limitations of the partition you are tryin to resize based on the size of the one next to it. I get that, but Sierra has plenty of room to spare. I can shrink Sierra, but it creates a new partition. In fact, any adjustment it will let me make results in a new untitled partition. I wish I could just drag the pie slices.

Have you tried to shrink the size of the partition you wish to shrink, apply changes, then increase the size of the one you want to increase? (basically making it two separate actions.?)

I would try Paragon Partition Mangager https://www.paragon-software.com/home/hdm-mac/

 

[LarryJoe33]

Have you tried to shrink the size of the partition you wish to shrink, apply changes, then increase the size of the one you want to increase? (basically making it two separate actions.?)

I would try Paragon Partition Mangager https://www.paragon-software.com/home/hdm-mac/

Just did, shrunk Sierra to 110GB and it created a new 30GB Untitled partition. It still wouldn't let me increase High Sierra after doing so. I'll give paragon a shot now.
[doublepost=1504462839][/doublepost]Couldn't get Paragon installed. Had to reboot continuously to complete the installation that said way already completed. Maybe not ready to be installed on APFS even though I was going to use it for HFS.

 

[LarryJoe33]

I literally can not make any partition bigger on this drive. It reverts back to the current size. Very frustrating. I though DU was better at this stuff?

 

[eyvind]

I don't think Disk Utility supports moving filesystems, only resizing them. You'll have to back up the Sierra partition, resize the High Sierra partition, re-create Sierra and restore the backup.

 

[LarryJoe33]

I don't think Disk Utility supports moving filesystems, only resizing them. You'll have to back up the Sierra partition, resize the High Sierra partition, re-create Sierra and restore the backup.

Thanks, ultimately that is what I ended up doing. Deleting partitions to force others to increase. That said, I still couldn't get to where I wanted so I blew the drive away and re-partitioned it.

 

[Weaselboy]

Thanks, ultimately that is what I ended up doing. Deleting partitions to force others to increase. That said, I still couldn't get to where I wanted so I blew the drive away and re-partitioned it.

Sorry, I'm late to the party. But I think your issue is (was) related to the order these partitions were laid out on the drive. When you resize, you can only resize into free space below the partition you want to resize and that space cannot be ahead of any other partition.

 

[mikecwest]

I don’t think DiskUtility is better at it. IPartition is good, but is expensive. Paragon worked for me, and using a free trial. IPartition will move data around as needed to properly repartition the drive. For most advanced operations, DU is far behind third party utilities. When it comes to APFS, it is not the case yet. I am sure it will be in the future, unless APFS fizzles and dies.

 

[LarryJoe33]

Thanks for all the advice. I guess what surprises me here the most is that DU could have at least told me why I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. Instead of just going back to 150GB from setting of 180GB. That’s strange for Apple to not at least tell me what the limitations are. Even a few googles didn’t bring up any Apple documentation and really on a few third party How To’s that still weren’t completely clear. I realized after a while that I probably should have laid it out different or maybe since most of the partitions were bootable OS clones, then that was a limitation? The pie is misleading, makes you think it’s as easy as dragging the slices around.