For those of you that are experiencing the problem of losing your active flag that DON'T have windows and whatnot to fall back on, try out the following:

Boot from your install disk with the -s flag. After everything is loaded do the following:

1. fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
2. flag 1
3. update
4. write
5. quit
6. reboot

This did the trick for me.

You should also verify/repair the disk and permissions, though I noticed this will break the time machine fix, so you'll need to reinstall the IONetworkingFamily.kext and reset it's permissions to 755 and own it back to root:wheel.

Hi there,

I was wondering if someone could advise me before I take the plunge and do this, heres the situation;

I installed OS X from DVD onto my HDD. I then installed a more up to date version on a 2nd partition, leaving me with a HDD with 2 partitions - each with a working version of Leopard on them. I decided to delete the first install and I have been using the second partition since. When I view my HDD in Disk Utility, I have my current partition with empty space above it due the deletion of the first partition - I can increase the size downwards (not downwards in size but literally) using the GUI, but not upwards to use the free space that is left on my HDD.

So, my questions are;

Will the method detailed in previous posts to merge two partitions work in my scenario?
If so, can I create an unformatted partition in OS X, or do I have to use windows?

Will me installing a fresh copy of Leopard on a new partition above my current one, then using Migration Assistant to copy my files over from the other volume be just as effective?

Thanks for any advice on this.

I have XP installed on one partition. OSX86 on another. I am dual booting using chain0 in xp file directory. I want to delete my xp partition and expand my OSX86 partition to the full size of my hard drive and make it bootable. How can I go about doing that?

Same problem, but this method works also with disk mbr?

you need MbrFix.


from windows's cmd do:



note down your partition's number



note down the partition type ID for HFS+



everything without <>
now you should be done
pay extra atention to your partition number as you don't want to make another partition unreadable
I haven't tested this but I think I spelled the commands right 
only do this if you have MBR not GUID

i have GUID and it failed, now I cant see my install partition but i can see the partition to be merged, tried repair disk and verify disk from diskutility after booting of install disk but it didnt work. I get "Error: Filesystem verify and repair failed."

Please help!!

does it work with both MBR and GPT ?? I would like do this in my MBR partition..

Yes, it works with MBR.



For people who got the "mediaKit reports partition (map) too small" error...something weird worked for me. My setup was something like:


I wanted to merge the two HFS+ partitions but kept getting that "partition map too small" error. I reformatted the NTFS partition to HFS+ and merged disk0s2 and disk0s5 fine. That merged partition then merged with the first partition without the error making my entire disk one partition.

Not sure why it worked, but maybe it offers some insight to someone.

I created a new partition, and it does not appear in Disk Utility so I can't erase it via Leopard (does not appear in Terminal disklist too =/ ).

for me this was quite easy:

Before I have 3 partitions on a 1 TB drive
- partition 1 with the system on it ( HFS+ Journaled)
- partition 2 with files ( HFS+ Journaled)
- partition 3 empty with fat formated

partition was for me to small

I started Disk Util and choose the drive ( 931,5 GB Samsung)
and choose the partition tab
- you see the 3 partitions
- click in the field of partition 2
- click the minus sign above and confirm the dialog
- do the same for partition 3
- then you have only 1 partition left- your system start disk
- click in this partition 1 and resize it with the mouse or put in the desired size and apply
- click the plus sign and create a new partition and apply

this works for me fine on a Gigabyte P35-DS4 !

If I create a new partition in W7 it'll be "disk0s4" and OSX will be "disk0s2" (EFI is disk0s1 & W7 is disk0s3). Will it work if I still do this only replace the correct disk name (disk0s4 instead of disk1s2)? I can merge even though they are separated by the W7 partition. W7 is NTFS & OSX is HFS+, GPT.