I have the same problem.
Hope someone can help.

BIG UP ZUZA! BIG UP ALL OF YOU!

It works, just don't write "sudo". write (in terminal) : diskutil mergePartitions "Journaled HFS+" New disk...............etc...

The word "New" must be writen. Don't know the sense but it works like this.

Then, when reboot, the reboot will fail. YOU NEED Akronis to mark the disk as ACTIVE.

Then my reboot failed another way with that "all language" message with "you need to restart ..."

I restarted with anger, then it WORKED.

DONT GIVE UP!

Peace

Romainky

That did the trick for me! Thanks, zuza!

I'm also getting the blinking cursor upon restart. I tried diskpart.exe from Windows, it marked the Partition as Active (with the *), but upon reboot it still stays at the blinking cursor.

Hi, thanks all for help first of all.
Sorry for my english.
I had problems with partitions and all I did was step by step.
I have dual boot Leopard 10.5 flat img and Vista.
For OSX i use 160 GB HDD. From Vista Computer managment i make partition from the space left me on that disk after Leopard installed.
Then boot to Leopard. From Leopard DiskUtility format that partition to be Journaled OSX partition.
Then open Terminal and type this. Thanx too ZUZA.
--------------------------------------------------------------
diskutil list

that listed back 2 partitions with the identifiers: disk1s1 and disk1s2 (in other cases might be disk0...)

Now,

sudo diskutil mergePartitions "Journaled HFS+" New disk1s1 disk1s2

did the trick (New is the name, it will actually be ignored).

The first partition will be kept intact and the second one will be "merged" therefore you will loose all contents (I made sure it was empty before running the merge just in case).
---------------------------------------------------------------

After that open Disk Utility and select partition or disk you created. You will see that is bigger now.
Click to button Verify Disk. After that click to Repair Disk Permissions.
Reboot and pray.

I dont know is this help me to boot again to Leopard but that is all what i was dan.
Note: this is for all of you who try all tutorial posted before mine without luck. I hope that this will help someone.
Leopard flat-img 10.5, P35-DQ6, 2GB RAM, HD 2600 XT, Q6600.

zuza yr da man!!

When you do the partition if you click the option button look to make sure you don't have the to radio button check, some thing about guid.
Use the bottom one that works with dos it says . I have the same problem with it booting and I had the top radio button check in options.

Hi, I have the opposite problem. I have a 250G HD on my laptop. I gave it all to Leopard. Now I want to be able to dual boot into Vista. (The sad fact of my work, I am reduced to using Windows garbage ) However, I only want to give Vista 10-15G, I am wondering how I can down size the HFS+ partition without erasing the Leopard installation?

It's not working for me, for some reason. I get everything right in terminal, it asks for my password... and then nothing happens.

do a diskutil list

diskutil mergePartitions "Journarled HFS+" New diskXsY diskXsZ if the partitions are called Y and Z !
Remember you are merging PARTITIONS not DISKS!

If it doesn't show another partition if you did a flat image then you need to make it in windows!



Sticman

sorry guys..

I knew the answer. looked in vista and of course the partition was not activated..

Finally got around to getting Leopard osx86 and after all sorts of struggle, thank you zuza -- that worked without a hitch!

thank you zuza!!!!!

I just did a Leopard install from ToH and went from PATA 20G drive to a SATA 320G drive using dd in linux. I tried to use "parted" to resize my hfs+ partition, but learned it will only shrink! So I was stuck with a 20G partition on that drive for Leopard. Orginally I just formated the remainder partition for Leopard, but was learning real quick that everything for MAC likes to go into the "applications" folder and in the users folder (ie iTunes, Docs etc)... I was making alias to get through most of this, but it didn;t work like I wanted so I looked into growing my Leopard hfs+ partition and FINALLY found this thread! This worked seemlessly for me and I figured I would have to go back and make the partition bottable, but I didn't. It just worked!

Thanks a LOT! This should defintely be a thread in the genius bar!

I partitioned my Hard Drive with Disk Utility in 10.5.1, I had no troubles and no volume was erased. You can also merge partitions without a trouble.

your opinion:

The question left un answered here (i am not ready to find out just yet) is where can this partition be? can i merge with a partition that is before the mac partition using the simple steps?

Zuza's method worked perfectly for me. Thanks!

I also get this error saying "Mediakit reported the partition (map) is too small". I've tried anything, with and without sudo, all kinds of types for the partition I want to merge to my Leopard partition, nothing seems to work. Does this method only apply to GUID partitioned disks? Mine is MBR partitioned.

FIY: my disk is partitioned as follows:

disk0s1: NTFS (Windows)
disk0s2: Journaled HFS+ (Leopard)
disk0s3: MS DOS FAT (Partition to be merged to leopard)
disk0s5: NTFS (Windows DATA partition)

So I typed: diskutil mergePartitions "Journaled HFS+" New disk0s2 disk0s3
I've also tried this by booting from the install DVD and trying it from the terminal there, but no luck.

Any ideas?
Thanks a lot!

finetuned

I think, disk0s3: MS DOS FAT must be unformatted. Delete it, create again, but did not format it.

I'm having trouble with increasing my Leopard partition. Just to make sure I'm not missing anything stupid:
-Created unformatted partition after my leopard partition
-Used DiskUtility to format partition as Extended(Journaled)
-In terminal:

then


Can anyone help figure out what's wrong?
Thanks

Looks like you formatted one in HFS Journalled and the other in HFS or else some other mismatch - eg Case sensitive and not case sensitive. Use Disk Utility to get the exact match for the new partition you are erasing. Can't merge apples and oranges

hi.

i had the following config:
disk0s1: vista recover
disk0s2: vista
disk0s3: hfs+ (leo)

so now i resized the vista partition in order to increase the leo partition:
disk0s1: vista recover
disk0s2: vista
disk0s3: FREE
disk0s4: hfs+ (leo)

now my question is: can i join the free space to the leo partition, even if it is BEFORE leo?? (ironslave has similar problem - still unanswered)

Followed instructions to a T; however, the new partition it created was an extended partition...I didn't think much of it, my setup was like this, all primary partitions:

begin | windows(45GB) | leopard(25GB) | free space(60GB) | ntfs partition(100GB) | end

Made a new, unformatted partition in vista that occupied the free space, booted to os x, erased it with Journaled HFS+, ran the mergePartition with the 60GB partition as the second argument (was disk0s5) and it somehow erased part of the ntfs partition, leaving 40GB of free space, with the new leopard as 140GB instead of 80GB. Now the setup is this:

begin | windows(45GB) | leopard(140GB) | freespace(40GB) | end

The weird thing is, the 100GB ntfs partition was primary, not extended, so when I made the new partition, why did it have any connection to the ntfs partition? And you can't say that I picked the wrong partition, otherwise I would have 60GB of free space left, or none at all.

I would avoid using vista's disk management to create the new partition from empty space and just use fdisk from the OS X CD if I did this again.

Last login: Tue Mar 11 10:48:50 on console
devins-mac-pro:~ Devin$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *149.1 Gi disk0
1: Windows_NTFS Windows XP 20.0 Gi disk0s1
2: 79.0 Gi disk0s3
3: Apple_HFS Leopard 50.0 Gi disk0s2
devins-mac-pro:~ Devin$ sudo diskutil mergePartitions "Journaled HFS+" New disk0s1 disk0s2
Password:
The chosen disk does not support resizing, do you wish to format instead? (y/N) n
Merge canceled
devins-mac-pro:~ Devin$


"The chosen disk does not support resizing, do you wish to format instead? (y/N)"

Is that normal?

Sorry, my bad. I was looking at the left numbers and not the right side ones.

Sorry.

Can someone please post more specific steps to Zuza's method. i didn't quite understand what he means. Thank a bunch.

I tried this but failed. At least, the merged partition is not bootable any more even it is set to be active.

Sorry to clutter,
can anyone explain in zuza's method, what type of partition to create on the unallocated space following the
15GB partition (shown as Layout: Partition Type:Basic FileSystem: [empty] in the windows XP Disk Management console),
The options when right clicking the unallocated space is to create a "primary" or "extended" partition,
which one should I select?
thanx a million,
--tzurs

primary

Just for your info. From man diskutil.

mergePartitions [force] format name fromDevice toDevice

Merge two or more partitions on a disk. All data on merged partitions other than the
first will be lost. The first will be erased if it doesn't have a resizable type (e.g.
JHFS+) or if the force argument is given. Format and name apply only when the first par-
tition is being erased. Merged partitions are required to be ordered sequentially on disk
(see diskutil list for the actual on-disk ordering). Ownership of the affected disk is
required.

this is my problem:


I installed Leopard on partition2 [~195GB], but here it shows up only 15GB and there's no clue where "disk1s3" or the rest of the partition (~180GB) went
please help me to bring them back.
(without erase my music part, thanks)

I tried and I got this:



My partition is realy small only 7GB

PLS help.
10x

Use Gparted .3.4-11 live cd.

Is the disk partitioned using "Master Boot Record" or using GUID? I suspect the reason half of use are saying "wow I worked great I am a genius" and the other half are saying "dang it didn't work at all" is that the first half formatted with Master Boot Record and the second half including me used GUID.

I have GUID. One benefit of GUID is its supposed to let you automagically merge partitions. However, in this case with extra space, I try to do it in Disk Utility GUI and it fails.

I took the disk over to an XP box and tweaked the extra space into and unformatted partition. When I brought it back the mac was very unhappy about it and chewed on it for a while before un-doing what I did to it in XP.

Another approach that hasn't been discussed much, if you happen to have enough space disk laying around, is to use Disk Utility to turn the old small disk into a Disk Image, then use Disk Image to restore it to the new bigger disk. Read the instructions in the Restore tab, it all happens there. Or click the New Image button and read this article http://www.macworld.com/article/50355/2006/04/dndimage.html I guess this is happy with the EFI partition, not 110% certain.

Thanks for the idea luh3417, it worked! Just had to restore the darwin bootloader with iAtkos boot DVD...

Ok...this is my situation

I've installed off of a Samsung IDE drive 200GB....
Disk utility insists the drive's capacity is 128GB..
Gparted recognizes 60GB of unallocated space that I can format...
Should I format it (and to what spec fat32,hfs?) and then try the terminal merge method...????
Don't wanna mess up my current leopard installation.

????

Creating partition is not the same as formatting it. Just create new partition and leave it unformatted. Then try Zuza's way.

WOW, it worked on a MBR disk.

I mounted the disk of a Delll GX620 on a Mac Pro, then from Terminal I ran the diskutil command and it concatenated the two partitions.

anyone know how to make a leopard partition smaller?

I installed OSx86 on a 120 GB partition. Windows and GParted shows that the partition is 120 GB. Mac shows that it's about 10 GB. ???????. I can't do the "create a new partition and merge it" thing because it's already taking up all the room and it won't resize. So what do I do?

I have, well had, two partitions on a GUID formatted drive. One was for OSX (Leopard) and the other for Vista. I also run Vista in Fusion.I was testing Fusion til I felt comfortable enough to erase my Windows drive. For me, using GUID, it was a snap to use Disk Utility. First, I just deleted the Vista partition. That was a snap. Then I just dragged the corner of the OSX partition to the bottom and hit "apply". This resized my OSX partition to cover the entire drive. Bye bye winblows. And no problems since.If you are using GUID, just do what I mentioned but in reverse

ZuZu's instructions worked perfectly - great job ! If you search for instructions to increase an NFS+ partition
just about all posts say this cannot be done. So ZuZu showed some cool "out of the box" thinking !

However, since I do not have Vista I used the following steps to accomplish the same results and I added a few other steps (5 below) that you might want to consider.

1) I started with the following partitons on my laptop - 160 gb:
a. Bootit NG (my partition Boot Manager) on the first partition
b. Windows XP Pro (SP3) on the second partition - 40gb
c. Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Kaylway) on the third partition - 22gb
d. The rest was blank.

1) I use Bootit NG to create a 4th partition of 20gb. As a note, Bootit NG cannot create a HFS+ partition but
it can change an NTFS partition to an NFS+ partition.

2) From Leopard I erased the newly created partition and then i did the following in Terminal:
a. sudu -s
b. diskutil list
c. That listed back 4 partitions with the identifiers: disk0s1 through disk0s4. disks03 was my Mac OS X partition and disks04 was the blank HFS+ partion that I created with Bootit NG

3) diskutil mergePartitions "Journaled HFS+" New disk0s3 disk0s4

4) The above command took only 10 seconds to complete with no error messages.

5) I did perform a "Verify disk" and then "Repair Permissions" just to ensure that "all was well". The Repair
Permission found many changes.

6) Bingo !

Awesome! Just increased my 40GB HFS+ to 100GB HFS+ - now I can install FCP Studio!

Hey having some troubles,

I created the partition in vista and accidently formatted it. So i went back and deleted the partition then created a new simple partition without format.

Since then I have been getting this error whenever i tried to verify or repair the disc in Disk Util GUI on leopard

Invalid BS_jmpBoot in boot block: 000000

Also when i try to erase the partition it comes up with failed mediakit is illogic or some such

ty for help to anyone,

Jak

Partitions merged but filesystem messed-up

Hi. My initial setup SATA 149.1GB:
disk0s1 - WINDOWS (NTFS)- 30GB
disk0s2 - FILES(NTFS) - 90GB
disk0s3 - OSX(HFS+) - 20GB

What I did:

• Booted Sabayon Linux(LiveCD). Deleted disk0s2 using Gparted
• Created 2 unformated Partitions (in Gparted) 71GB and 27GB.
• After restarting, it failed to boot on my hdd. booted again on linux livecd then set the flag of my osx disk to 'boot' (using gparted)
• Leopard boots. Run diskutil mergePartitions "Journaled HFS+" New disk0s3 disk0s4. no errors were reported. Checked the partition, the changes we'rent reflected so I rebooted
• This time, HDD boot failed again "Error Loading Operating System"
• Boot again on Linux Live CD, check partition on gparted, the OSX disk was already set to 'boot', but it recognizes the merged partition as Linux Filesystem
• Tried booting the Leopard Installer, run Disk Utility. It can see the merged partition but it cannot recognize filesystem. Running verify volume failed. Repair Disk disable.

Can this be fixed? Thanks.

hey guess, i successfully repartitioned my windows drive (though it got rid of my hp recovery partition without asking me), and now osx has 80 GB of free space

except i can't get into it, i use easyBCD in vista and when i try and access OSX at boot it simply says "H" and won't load

any suggestions?

Both disk0s5 and disk0s6 are erased with HFS+ Journaled. Any ideas on why this error is still coming up for me?
My Disk is MBR.

ZuZu, thanks so much for your great tutorial!

Hello all,

my Leo disk0s2 has Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+.

Should I format the disk0s3 to Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+ or just create it with linux livecd and leave unformatted
before merging?

Can I use
sudo diskutil mergePartitions "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" New disk0s2 disk0s3?

Thanks and regards,

bozon42

PS: What about using resize from linux livecd if the abovementioned does not work?

i did exactly the same like what zuza posted before, it actually worked but it also merge my other hfs+ partition.

i have 4 partition :

1. disk0s1 of my system
2. disk0s2 is my data
3. disk0s3 is my other stuff
4. disk0s5 is my other partition that i want to merge with disk0s1

when i try to merge disk0s1 and disk0s5, it only took about 10 second. and boom, it succeed to merge my partitions but i lost my other partitions too. now i only have one partition that is disk0s1 using my entire disk. lost all of my data... so sad... :'(

Actually if you check the diskutil man page the partitions to be merged have to be sequential. In your case the diskutil merged (sequentially) from disk0s1 till disk0s5. The man page states that all partitions, except the first will be formated. So, that's what went wrong.