Increase Paritition Size?

[qwertytyper]

So I finally got Leapord on a second partition on my Win7 machine and got dual booting working absolutely perfectly. Unfortunately, I had horrible foresight because the partition I put it on was only like 10gb and and now I have about 3 left on my Mac OSX partition and about 250 free on my Win7. How can I safely transfer some of that 250 to my OSX partition without having to redo everything I worked for? Is it possible?

 

If it's not, I guess that's just what I deserve for not thinking ahead of time.

 

Any help is appreciated.

[xxxrichievxxx]

The only way to do this is to use Paragon Partition Manager, Erase the OSX partition. Resize The windows parition, and there will be some "free space" you create a new parition, boot from the CD and Reinstall.. Other than that It wont be able to happen :\

 

oh and by the way.. This is in a sticky thread

[TheDarkenedPoet]

I'm pretty new to running OS X on a PC but surely if you shrunk the windows partition and installed a third party drive utility on the OS X partition you should still be able to expand your partition without having to do a complete fresh install?

[srs5694]

TheDarkenedPoet is correct; xxxrichievxxx is being far too pessimistic. Some points:

 

• There are several tools that will resize and move NTFS partitions, not just Paragon Partition Manager. (Windows is very fussy about its boot partition, though. In my experience, it's safer to adjust the partition's end point than its start point.)
  
• Creating a backup, repartitioning, and restoring the backup is usually an option instead of doing a fresh install. For OS X, I use Carbon Copy Cloner for this with good results. For Windows, I recently did something similar with DriveImage XML. This is an awkward process, but it beats doing a fresh install, especially if you've invested a lot of time in customizing your settings.
  
• Instead of increasing the size of the OS X partition, consider creating a new partition in the free space after you've shrunk the Windows partition. OS X is pretty flexible about where you store data and even programs, so you can keep a small boot partition and put your programs and data elsewhere. This will have the added benefit of simplifying things should you later decide to install a new version of OS X (say, 10.7, whenever it's released) alongside your current installation.
  
• I'm positive that there are utilities that will move an HFS+ partition. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I did it myself a few weeks ago with GParted. (I did a lot of partition moving at that time, but I don't recall precisely which ones I moved.) Note that the filesystems GParted (and other GNU Parted variants) supports vary with the build.