Re-partitioning

[clykins90]

OK, heres the thing.

I was going to install Suse linux on my iMac G5. I re-formatted and came up with 1 20gb partition for linux, and a 60gb for os x. I never installed Suse and now i need the 20gb back. How do i merge the 2 back together without losing my data?

 

[CanadaRAM]

OK, heres the thing.

I was going to install Suse linux on my iMac G5. I re-formatted and came up with 1 20gb partition for linux, and a 60gb for os x. I never installed Suse and now i need the 20gb back. How do i merge the 2 back together without losing my data?

Essentially, you don't. Using Apple's Disk Utility to resize partitions will destroy all data

There may be some third party (commercial) programs that can do it for you, perhaps other MR members will chime in with their experience.

 

[balamw]

Any reason you don't want to just format the 20 GB HFS+ and mount it where you need it? e.g. ~/Movies or something like that. The nice thing about unix-style mounts is that you can put them where you want...

B

 

[clykins90]

I'd prefer to have 1 big partition. Although i'd never thought of doing that. Any 3rd party program that would do what I want?

 

[Timepass]

another option is to take the data in that 20 gig partition. copy it over to your main partition and then procede to destroy all the data on it putting it back in with your main one.,,

Mis read it... yeah you need a 3rd party app to do what you want to do and the 20 gig area may still lose all of its data.

 

[Duff-Man]

Duff-Man says....When I got my MacBook Pro the first thing I did was partition it - I wanted a 20GB partition to try the XP hack (this was before Boot Camp). I never got around to trying the hack - too busy - but then when Boot Camp was released I thought I'd try that instead. It wouldn't install with the partition I had already in place so I tried using Boot Camp's restore feature - it worked just fine...I then used it again to set up the XP install.

So.....I would say try using Boot Camp to restore to 1 partition - it seemed to have worked without trouble for me but ymmv so BACK UP your important stuff first of course...oh yeah!

 

[Duff-Man]

Duff-Man says....double post - how did that happen???...oh yeah!

 

[Heb1228]

For PCs theres a program called Partition Magic that allowed you to move partitions without losing data. However, I am not aware of a similar program for OS X. The Boot Camp idea sounds like an interesting one... it may work. But I'd back everything up first before trying it.

EDIT: Searched versiontracker and found these:

$60 VolumeWorks http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/23512
$45 iPartition http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/23828
$50 DiskStudio http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/26515

I think any of these would do what you want, but it doesn't look like there are any free options.