Partitioned MBP Hard Drive...

[TrentS]

When I first got my 17" 500 Gig MBP, I partitioned it into two hard drives. A mistake I now regret. And now my start-up hard drive, which includes all my valuable software, is down to only 280 MB left, which will not allow me to do simple number cruching in my applications.

Is there ANY way I can departition my hard drive, so I will be able to have one big hard drive, without losing all my applications. I don't think I can back up my Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and others, to a back up hard drive, and then transfer them back after departitioning, and actually have them all work.

Any ideas!?

 

[heisenberg123]

When I first got my 17" 500 Gig MBP, I partitioned it into two hard drives. A mistake I now regret. And now my start-up hard drive, which includes all my valuable software, is down to only 280 MB left, which will not allow me to do simple number cruching in my applications.

Is there ANY way I can departition my hard drive, so I will be able to have one big hard drive, without losing all my applications. I don't think I can back up my Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and others, to a back up hard drive, and then transfer them back after departitioning, and actually have them all work.

Any ideas!?

Carbon Copy Cloner might help you clone the partitions than you can format the harddrive back to 1 partition than restore both those cloned partitions back to the now 1 partition internal hard drive

 

[robgendreau]

I'm not sure what model you have, but when faced with a similar problem I extracted the HD and put it in an enclosure and replaced the internal with a bigger drive. Installed system software and then used setup assistant to migrate my applications back from the external, and life has been good since. Now I use the former internal HD as a backup drive.

Rob

 

[user418]

You can use utilities>disc utility to resize the partitions without losing data. Just another option to consider.

Here's some info on that:

http://churnd.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/resizing-disks-in-os-x/

 

[Mojo1]

iPartition makes it possible to partition a drive without having to reformat the drive. Just be sure that you have a good backup on another drive just in case something goes wrong.

But at $46.95 it's costly if you are only going to use it one time. If I remember correctly I purchased it at a discount...

http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition

I didn't know about the Disk Utility option to resize partitions without losing data. (Thanks user418!) I would still backup my data if I was going to go that route.

 

[user418]

iPartition makes it possible to partition a drive without having to reformat the drive. Just be sure that you have a good backup on another drive just in case something goes wrong.

But at $46.95 it's costly if you are only going to use it one time. If I remember correctly I purchased it at a discount...

http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition

I didn't know about the Disk Utility option to resize partitions without losing data. (Thanks user418!) I would still backup my data if I was going to go that route.

@mojo1 - you're welcome. Always backup before making changes to your system is something of a golden rule.

 

[TrentS]

Whew!!

I basically went out and bought a USB 64Gig stick for $39.95, unloaded 12.5 gigs worth of photos out of iPhoto onto it, then deleted the photos out of iPhoto. So now I can at least run my applications ( Photoshop, iMovie, iDVD )with no problems. I still have about 20 gigs more worth of photos I can offload onto my stick, and about 5 gigs worth of iTunes music I can offload. So for $39.95, that 64gig USB drive has really come in handy.

 

[harddrivefailur]

Have you considered a program like Partition Magic or something? They typically aren't that expensive and can actually offer you some pretty good features.

Sounds like your solution so far has been very piecemeal. You are probably going to need a permanent one if you want to keep from being annoyed in the future.

 

[riptideMBP]

A 64GB usb drive is cool, but why not consider a 1TB hard drive.