Mac HFS+ Partition Resize

[Arfer]

Hi, My Dell E520 originally came installed with Vista. I have since added XP and OSX 10.5.6 to make it a triple boot machine using MBR

 

I have now deleted XP from the PC and want to give the space over to OSX by increasing the partition size of the 10.5.6 installation.

 

I’m sure somebody here has done it successfully – I have looked via google for pointers on this and come up with more questions than I started with ;-)

 

Could someone point me in the direction of software that will help me do this job ?

 

TIA

[srs5694]

I'm pretty sure that libparted (the engine behind the text-based GNU Parted and GUI GParted) can resize HFS+, but that feature is also probably build-dependent. These tools are common on Linux-based emergency disks (Knoppix, Linux System Resuce CD, etc.), so you could try one of those.

 

Alternatively, I believe that OS X's own Disk Utility can resize HFS, but only if the disk uses GPT formatting. Chances are yours doesn't, so you'd need to convert to GPT (for instance, using my GPT fdisk utility, resize (using a Mac OS boot DVD), and then add a hybrid MBR for the benefit of Windows. This is a rather risky procedure, though; there's a good chance that Windows would end up unbootable after you're done. It's probably better to find a solution in MBR-land.

 

Yet another option, albeit one that's not what you asked for, would be to use the space as a second HFS+ partition. You could set up one or more symbolic links so that the space could be used more-or-less transparently from your current directory structure.

[Arfer]

Hi Rod,thanks for the reply. I had already decided that the GPT option was not viable and had tried all sorts of linux emergency disks. But did find this solution in the forum;

 

zuza View Member Profile Add as Friend Send Message Find Member's Topics Find Member's Posts ipsmenu.register( "post-member-497648", '', '', '' ); InsanelyMac Protégé Nov 6 2007, 11:13 PM Post #26

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Ok, I've started with a 15 GB partition (on a 400GB disk). In Vista I've created a second partition but did not format it. From Leopard I've erased the newly created partition and then used:

 

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).