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elleana

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 30, 2009
229
9
How do I increase the size of my system disk? I very cleverly decided that I would split my HDD (1TB) into two partitions, first one ~320GB for the system, the rest for all my other stuff. Now, I'm fast running out of space on the system partition, yet there is still plenty of space left on the second partition, so I want to rebalance the size of both. Except when I go into disk utility I can play around with the size of the second partition, but the first (system) partition is locked. Is there any way around this?
 
You are describing the classic and persistent problem with multiple partitions. Partitioning your hard drive to run multiple OSes may be a good idea. However, partitioning your hard drive to separate the OS from your data is not. You will continually find that one of your partitions does not have the capacity that you need or want. Fix the problem today only to have it again next week. My suggestion to you is to unify your partitions. Get a large external hard drive for your data.
 
I believe you aren't supposed to resize the partition your system is running off of. Before you go playing around with partitions, make sure you have backups of both partitions. Then boot off your OS install disc, go to Utilities -> Disk Utility and try from there.
 
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