non-destructively resizing HFS+ is possible!!

[cb911]

well good news to all people!! it's now possible to resize your HFS+ partitions to rearrange your HD.

all thanks to a GNU project called Parted. great stuff.

so i want to resize my OS X boot partiton to make it bigger, that means i'll have to expand it into my other HFS+ partition. from what i've read, Parted can do this... but i just want to double, and maybe triple check that it will work before i actually try it. of course i'm going to backup, but i won't try if someone warns me about it.

there's been a bit of discussion about it on the Gentoo forums: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=123556&resize+hfs.

so what i'm think i'll do is use the 'resize' command to just shift around my OS X boot volume to make it bigger... can anyone tell me if this will work alright? surely there's someone here that has more experience with this than me?

i've read the Parted manual as well. (or as much as time permits ).

i would really appreciate if somone could just reassure me that this will actaully work.

edit>> i just thought, it would be a good idea to install the latest Parted on my Gentoo system, since i'll only be working with my HFS+ partitions.

 

[OutThere]

On their website they say that Parted can only "detect" hfs volumes, and not resize/etc.

 

[Westside guy]

On their website they say that Parted can only "detect" hfs volumes, and not resize/etc.

I've used Parted a lot on x86 systems, and it's a great tool. But I don't see HFS+ mentioned at all on http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/. Could this be out of date? cb911, do you have something you could point us to that says it'll do hfs+ resizing?

 

[cb911]

yeah, i know the site says it only detects HFS, but there's been alot of discussion about using Parted sucessfully on HFS+.

i looked into it a bit more, and there is a HFS+ resize patch for Parted. so it appears there has been an update, or at least a patch.

also the Gentoo PPC FAQ under the section 'Can i dual-boot Gentoo & OS X' says:

Gentoo PPC FAQ
Alternatively use parted from the recent LiveCD, that can handle HFS and HFS+ partitions.

well i've got the LiveCD which was only released a few months ago, i think, so i guess it's got the patched version of Parted on there.

also i just wanted to check the right command to use in Parted. i've got hda1-4 as my Linux partitions, and hda5-7 as HFS+ partitions. so if i want to resize my Panther boot volume (hda5) i'd just type something like "(parted) resize 5 start end"? i'd have to figure out the start and end points i want for that partition.

 

[blue&whiteman]

why would it work on hfs but not hfs+? hfs should only be used over hfs+ if the drive is very small (2gb or amaller). on a drive that small you wouldn't even want to partition it. makes no sense. hfs is only suitable for small drive running a classic os.

 

[cb911]

why would it work on hfs but not hfs+?

no, it does work on HFS+! there's a patched version.

but can anyone tell me if i mentioned the right code in my above post? i guess no one here has used it to resize HFS+?...

 

[Westside guy]

That should work, but I'd probably use it more interactively. If you type "parted /dev/hda" it should then prompt you for the command, and then it'll prompt you for the starting and ending locations.

There's an example here on parted's docs page.

The main issue I've had with parted before was it doesn't use cylinders to mark "start" and "end" - it uses size. Now supposedly it'll round to the cylinder boundary; but still I'd prefer to set that directly.

Hey I'm not familiar with the Gentoo Live CD. although I've heard of it - is that a bootable Gentoo disk? Which file do you grab to try that out? I've looked on their server and it looks like there are multiple files that might be what I want.

 

[cb911]

ah thanks for that. i missed the bit about "parted device".

well i'll try it out when i get a chance.

aahhh... another prospective Gentoo user! yep, LiveCD is bootable. it's got irssi and some other stuff on there as well. that really helped me out when i was installing. i had to get on #gentoo-ppc to get some help

i think whichever mirror you choose you should download the Universal LiveCd for the architecture you want (ie. PPC, x86 etc). the path for the PPC LiveCd is "/pub/gentoo/releases/ppc/2004.0/livecd/universal"

although it really depends what you want to do with hit. the LiveCD has everything you need, but you can also download the seperate stages to save Dl'ing all 600MB.

it also looks like they've divided up the handbook into specific sectoins of PPC x86, amd64, etc which should help you alot. when i installed Gentoo it was just the one version of the handbook which was really for x86, with extra PPC instructions that you had to read.

have a read of the Gentoo PPC handbook. that explains better about the minimal livecd and the universal livecd.