FDisk Partiton not supported

[takeawaydave]

Been trying to resize Mac OS partition. I have a single SATA 250gb HD with the following

 

 

Vista 30 GB (NTFS)

OSX 30GB (Mac OS x Extended Journaled)

OS X 80GB (Mac OS x Extended Journaled)

 

I have 90GB free space and would like to extend the 80GB OS X partition.

 

I have a copy of Drive Genius which tells me that the Fdisk partiion scheme is not supported when I try to repartition. I partitoned my disk with I think Acronis Disk Director (its been a while since I did this) and I gather that it wrote the fdisk partiton scheme.

 

I'm confused as to where to go from here..... would I have been able to create an NTFS partition on an HFS partioned disk that is (I think) a disk that has the partiton table written to an HFS table.

 

Pleez pleez some one help!

[takeawaydave]

I guess no one knows the answer....

[BJMoose]

I'm not sure if I understand exactly what you're trying to do, but I'll give it a whiff. Do you currently have 3 partitions on this drive: 30gb NTFS, 30gb HFS+(OSX), and 80gb HFS+(OS X) and 90gb more of unallocated space? Do you want to turn your 80gb HFS+ into 170gb, while maintaining your other 2 30gb partitions? If that's the case, it's not so hard to do. First, you need to back up any data on the 80gb partition. I'm not sure about Mac programs that will allow you to resize without losing data (lots of software to do this in Windows, I'm just not that aware of all the partitioning software available for OSX).

 

Once you've backed up all your data, boot your computer into DOS with either a bootable floppy with FDisk on it or from a Boot CD like Hiren's. Once booted into DOS, locate your non-DOS partitions. FDisk will give you the choice to delete that partition (make sure it's the one you want and not your OSX partition. Once deleted, you will now have 170gb of unallocated space that you can create into a FAT32 partition while still in FDisk. Now just boot into OSX and let Disk Utility change the FAT32 partition to HFS+ OSX Journaled Extended. Hope this is what you're looking for. If not, maybe it will help someone else.

[fissioner]

hey dave, you have a couple options: before each of these options you must do these two commands in a terminal:

 

sudo diskutil enableJournal <path to the hfs+ partition that you want to resize>

sudo diskutil disableJournal <path to the hfs+ partition that you want to resize>

 

after doing the above, you can try:

 

1. downloading ipartition, which says that it can resize hfs+ volumes. it's shareware so i'm not sure how much mileage you'll get without shelling out money (i wouldn't pay anything)

2. downloading a linux live cd (basically a linux install cd), or creating any boot cd/floppy with gnu parted. (this is a handy cd to have anyways, faster than osx86 boot cds to quickly manipulate HDs and partitions). once you do that, you can use parted to shrink your hfs+ volume. then create a new hfs+ volume and copy the 80gb partition to the new one you created that's larger. (if that makes sense).

 

the problem here is that i don't know of a utility that will ENLARGE an hfs+ partition. parted will SHRINK one, and then you can create a new larger one.

 

now, diskutil has a resizeVolume command which will dynamically resize a journaled hfs+ partition but only if the disk is partitioned with GUID. that would be the best way to do it but you have an FDISK partition scheme. sorry... that's all i got.

 

-D

[takeawaydave]

BJMOoose and Djoldman thanks for getitngback.

 

I never tried iPartition before I'll give it ago at somepoint but as you say I'm sure they'll want some $$ before I can play with partitons 100gB+. My thread really was about trying to grow an HFS partition and as expected not so possible at the moment. SO as BJMoose explained all was left was to burn burn and burn DVDs until I'd backed up all my data and then repartition.