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Resizing a partition without losing data?

L

LightYagami

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 3, 2009
9
0
I know there are already a ton of threads like this one out there, I was just getting a lot of conflicting data from them, and didn't really want to screw this up... Well here's the problem.
My HDD is currently divided into two partitions, I am trying to shrink the 2nd partition, and expand the 1st without losing the data on my 2nd partition. Is this Possible?
I've tried VolumeWorks 1.5 from a bootable DVD but for some reason when I open it and select my hard drive, the left column where a list of my partitions should be is blank, and all the buttons on the bottom are blanked out except "close" and "rebuild".
I was going to try booting from CD and running disk utility to accomplish this, but most of the stuff I've read says that shrinking a partition with DU will erase the data. ?
So I guess my question is what would be the best way of accomplishing my task?

Thanks in advance and sorry if this was asked and answered elsewhere.
 
I have used disk utility to create and re-size partitions many times and i have never run into problems with data loss. Go with disk utility. You really don't have to boot into the install disk to do it either. You can re-size the partition inside OSX while it is running
 
I don't believe this works if one of the partitions is a Boot Camp partition

If you have a Boot Camp partition I believe you will have to clone it to another drive, run Boot Camp Assistant to delete the partition, then recreate it with a different size (with Boot Camp Assistant) and restore your clone.


Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
 
I have not tried to resize a bootcamp partition, disk utility warns you not to do anything with a bootcamp partition because it could cause bootcamp to not recognize it and make it impossible to remove the partition with bootcamp assistant. What I have done is I have shrunk the OSX partition, and then created a new partition while still keeping a bootcamp partition intact. This worked and left the bootcamp partition untouched and still recognizable.
 
Hey, thanks for the quick responses.
I tried disk utility from The Disk and the hard drive, with the same results:
Partition failed with the following error:
Filesystem resize support required, such as HFS+ with journaling enabled.

I'm pretty new with macs, so unfortunately I have no idea what that means... I have to run out for a few hours, but will try any suggestions you may have as soon as I get back.

Also on a side note, when I tried to resize the partition, I put it down from 60 to 54GB but it automatically changed it to 46GB for some reason, I don't really mind if its 46 or 54, but just curious if you guys had any ideas.

Thanks Again.
 
SaSaSushi said:
Winclone works great for cloning Bootcamp partitions and as mentioned above it will allow you to restore it to any partition of equal or greater size to the one you backed up.
Click to expand...

I also would recommend using this, i have used it many times to restore a bootcamp partition after removing and then recreating a bigger partition with bootcamp assistant.
 
Hey again, well I enabled journaling and it resized the second partition, but I can't make the 1st partition (the one with OSX installed on it) bigger. And touchdownjesus, no, its not a bootcamp partition. Im going to try and dig up my OSX cd, I think I might just backup and reformat. oh well...
 
LightYagami said:
Hey again, well I enabled journaling and it resized the second partition, but I can't make the 1st partition (the one with OSX installed on it) bigger. And touchdownjesus, no, its not a bootcamp partition. Im going to try and dig up my OSX cd, I think I might just backup and reformat. oh well...
Click to expand...

If you are having problems i would backup and reformat the disk and re-install. If you have leopard and time machine turned on the re-install is very simple and gets you up and running with your computer just the way it was before in around an hour. I've done this twice because of bootcamp problems and other disk problems and its great.
 
SaSaSushi said:
Winclone works great for cloning Bootcamp partitions and as mentioned above it will allow you to restore it to any partition of equal or greater size to the one you backed up.
Click to expand...

My situation is this, I have Bootcamp as 248GB and my OS/X as 683 GB and I want to reduce my Bootcamp to something like 100 GB or 120GB and add the difference back to my OS/X drive. Will Winclone do that? In my case I would be cloning a 248GB drive and trying to restore it to a 120GB partition. Will that work? I think not. Please advise if I am wrong?
 
WizardHunt said:
My situation is this, I have Bootcamp as 248GB and my OS/X as 683 GB and I want to reduce my Bootcamp to something like 100 GB or 120GB and add the difference back to my OS/X drive. Will Winclone do that? In my case I would be cloning a 248GB drive and trying to restore it to a 120GB partition. Will that work? I think not. Please advise if I am wrong?
Click to expand...

I had 11 gb of data on my BootCamp partition and even though WinClone compressed that down to around 4 I believe I still could not restore that image onto a new 5 gb or 10 gb partition. That's just what happened to me.

ChrisN
 
WizardHunt said:
My situation is this, I have Bootcamp as 248GB and my OS/X as 683 GB and I want to reduce my Bootcamp to something like 100 GB or 120GB and add the difference back to my OS/X drive. Will Winclone do that? In my case I would be cloning a 248GB drive and trying to restore it to a 120GB partition. Will that work? I think not. Please advise if I am wrong?
Click to expand...

It depends on how much of the Bootcamp partition is free space. If you have more than 120GB of data written there it won't work. If less, it should.
 
ChrisN said:
I had 11 gb of data on my BootCamp partition and even though WinClone compressed that down to around 4 I believe I still could not restore that image onto a new 5 gb or 10 gb partition. That's just what happened to me.
Click to expand...

Winclone doesn't compress data. It backs up and then allows you to restore a partition and either increase or decrease the free space to fit the new target partition's size.
 
The easy and guaranteed way to resize a partition without losing data is simple - make a backup first.
If you dont have any backups , obviously the data is of such little value to you it wouldn't matter to you if you lost it.
 
Thanks Guys for all the replies. I will try WinClone and see how it does for me. I have used only about 50GB on my windows side of the allocated 248GB so I will see what happens. Thanks for all the input.
 
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