Restore/Expand OSX Installation?

[sid.]

hey guys,

 

so this is what i wanna do..

 

I have a HDD with GUID partition map with 2 partitions "MacHD" and "Stuff" on it.

 

As you would guess, "MacHD" holds my OSX86 installation. Now the problem is that the partition is getting smaller and I need to expand it.

 

What I had in mind was that I'll reformat the whole drive to be one partition and then restore OSX on it.

 

How can I do this without fail? I have a external USB HDD formatted to OSX Extended, I guess I can use that?

 

After reading through the forums looking at different threads for the same topic, I thought am gonna follow the route below:

 

1) Create sparse bundle image of "MacHD" onto Ext. HDD

2) Install a minimal copy of OSX on "MacHD", then use CCC to restore the image from Ext. HDD to "MacHD"

3) Boot into "MacHD" with [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] CD (Can I?)

4) Install Chimera v1.4.1 bootloader from [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] (This is what i currently run)

5) Reboot and Done

 

Will I be able to do this? Is this one of the preferred ways?

 

Another thing that I was leaning towards was, Can I just extend my "MacHD" partition safely? The next partition after "MacHD" on the same drive has about 70gigs on it, So would I be able to extend "MacHD" by about 30gigs? safely?

 

Please give me your inputs on my problem and share the ways you do it...

[Sotirios Papakonstantinou]

Well, maybe I'm talking nonsense, I have too much time to use MacOS, but in theory you could delete the second partition (Stuff) from the disk and then expand the first partition (MacHD) to take all the available space. This could be done from Disk Utility, otherwise from the terminal. This is the way one would do it in Windows Vista or 7 (Windows XP requires third party utility). Hopefully this is possible in MacOS 10.6 as well. At worst you could find a third party utility for Mac to do it.It is much quicker, even if you need a third party utility, than messing with installing/restoring MacOS.

[sid.]

Well I already had tired to expand normally via Disk Utility but does'nt work even with the GUID partition map. Disk Utility could'nt unmount "Stuff" to format/erase it.

 

Anyways, I got it working finally and expanded the "MacHD" partition to fill up the entire disk. I erased the "Stuff" partition in Win7 using Mac Drive but did not set a format. Then back to Mac, I formatted "Stuff" to Extended and then deleted it via Disk Utility, then again expanded MacHD and it worked perfectly!! Enjoying the full space now!