carlolaitano Posted October 24, 2011 Share Posted October 24, 2011 Background info: I have a 160GB hard drive for my system install. Formatted it to MBR for OSX86. I had Snow Leopard installed in a partition (half the disc) and had another partition ready for Lion install. I was able to install Lion (using iAtkos L1, 10.7.2 combo update, Chimera 1.4.5, [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url], etc.) successfully on the second partition so I proceeded to delete everything in the partition I had for Snow Leopard. Problem: I want to expand the Lion partition to the unused space from the left over partition but apparently you can't do that with MBR HFS+ disks. The one solution I found that I believe should work is the following: Make a disk image of my Lion partition and save it to an external drive. Reformat the startup disk to have only one partition and then restore the image to that disk (either with the iAtkos DVD or with gparted). It all sounds somewhat straightforward but I don't know if this will work. I'm afraid if "just" restoring the disk image to the newly formatted drive will actually work. Should my system boot normally after, without any extra installs, or will I have to re-install Chimere 1.4.5 and everything else? I'd appreciate if anyone could confirm if this will work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil43 Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 Well I see no reason to jack with distributions. And you should be using GUID partition scheme not MBR. Other then that, the task is simple. Download Carbon Copy Cloner. Prepare an external hard drive (partition GUID and format MAC OS Extended (journaled)). Clone your Lion partition to the external. Download Chimera 1.5.4 standalone boot loader installer tool and run it with the external drive as the target. Then reboot to the external drive to confirm that you have your cloned system in tact. Then while booted to the external, reformat and partition your 160GB internal drive using the GUID partition scheme to the one partition. Then clone from the external back to the internal drive. Again download Chimera 1.5.4 boot loader installer tool and run it with the internal drive as the target. Reboot to the internal drive. If you do process in this order your probability of success approaches 100% and your risk of loosing you installation approaches 0%. neil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlolaitano Posted October 27, 2011 Author Share Posted October 27, 2011 Oh thanks Neil! Pretty simple. I used MBR cause I used to have a windows partition where the Lion now is. Using GUID won't give me issues booting correct? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil43 Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 You should have less trouble with GUID partition scheme and OS X. In fact retail Lion does not install well on MBR scheme. The key here and with all hacks, is to plan ahead and always have a recovery path. Generating a clone provides the recovery path. neil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlolaitano Posted October 28, 2011 Author Share Posted October 28, 2011 Sounds good. I'll do that and let you know how it went. Thank you for your time Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rakusson Posted October 28, 2011 Share Posted October 28, 2011 Sounds good. I'll do that and let you know how it went. Thank you for your time I had similar problem like you and with Win 7 partition (I have MBR & whatsoever no performance issue with dual booting win 7 and Lion using latest chameleon 1662). I had C partition with Win 7, D partition (drive) with Backup (both NTFS) and rest 20 gb for Lion. Since, I decided to use Lion, I gotta get more space. So I did: 1. Went to Win 7. Using disk management, shrank my D drive. 2. Got a new volume of 30 GB. 3. Splitted again this volume in 10 and 20 GB. 4.Went to Lion and formatted these both new volume to HFS. 5. why two volumes of 10 and 20 gb? coz, I want to keep 10 gb as backup for Lion and wanted to merge 20 gb with Lion's 20 gb so that finally, I would be having 40 gb for Lion. 6. I had already cloned my Lion in my USB external hard disk so I boot from external HD. 7. If you remember, now I have 3 HFS partition of 10, 20 and 20 gb partition respectively. 8. My current Lion is installed in last 20 gb, so I deleted it 9. then I restored my Lion using usb HD to newly created 20 gb HFS volume. 10. then I used my USB stick to boot into the newly cloned disk (u need to install chameleon again to boot). 11. Then I used a command called mergePartition to merge the newly created 20 gb partition with old 20 gb! diskutil list Will list the disk info by type, size, identifier diskutil mergePartitions HFS+ Lion disk0s3 disk0s4 Where, Lion=new partition name.even if you provide existing partition name, it works disk0s3=volume identifier of first disk in row or rank to be merged (very important coz nothing will be deleted from the first volume or partition but everything will be deleted of the next volume to be merged) disk0s4=volume identifier of 2nd partition or volume to be merged (every thing will be deleted) ( For more, see this link mergin volume in Mac OS X Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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