Working: How to increase Leopard partition size

[zuza]

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).

[i_am...me]

Thanks a bunch just tried it and it worked!!

[pronto]

zuza, can i use XP instead of Vista in creating a second partition?

[Digital Dark Age]

Thanks Zuza! I followed your instructions and formated the drive as Mac Os Extended (Journaled) in Disk Utility and it worked great.

 

Pronto: I used XP and it seemed to work for me.

 

Update: Hmm, I tried to copy over a large file to the drive and it said disk is full. I restarted and now I have "Disk error". I guess I will reintall and try again.

 

Update: Ok after reinstall I had the exact same problem. After digging aroud a bit it ended up that the drive wasn't set to active. I used Acronis in XP to set it to active and Leo came back right back up. I copied over 70 GB of files and it seems to be working. Thanks again Zuza!

[pronto]

Thanks for the info Digital Dark Age, will try it when i get home.

[CJS]

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).

wow that actually works... didn't know that... is it new in leopard?

[onradar]

Thanks for this info. Totally helped me out.

[fozzylyon]

The merge seemed to work perfectly from the results in OSX, but when I rebooted it no longer found a bootable drive.

 

@DDA: What acronis application lets you 'enable' partitions?

 

@anyone: I've never changer bootloaders, but it's worked without it until now. Is that causing a problem now that I messed with the hd?

[i_am...me]

try a linux live CD like partition magic or gparted. and add a boot flag

[dhomi]

try a linux live CD like partition magic or gparted. and add a boot flag

 

Would one of these live CDs be able to resize HFS+ partitions without damaging them ?

[Royston Koh]

thanks a bunch for this tip

[fozzylyon]

Would one of these live CDs be able to resize HFS+ partitions without damaging them ?

 

Theoretically, yes. (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=89960) But I haven't had good luck with live CD's myself.

 

I tried Breezy and it didn't recognize my cd-rom drive so I couldn't get past startup. I tried Knoppix and I couldn't change anything on or about the harddrives (read-only access allowed it said).

 

So I guess that Acronis is my best/easiest bet. I just need to know if the product I want is Acronis Disk Director Suite or something else.

[deadite66]

i tried Acronis, resized the partition but leopard still said it was a 15gb partition even though windows said the partition was 80gb

[dhomi]

Could you give us a hand, Zuza ? What happens when you entered 'sudo diskutil mergePartitions "Journaled HFS+" New disk1s1 disk1s2 comand '

Terminal displays a warning message and asks for my password and then, nothing seems to happen.

 

Thanks for your reply (a screenshot would be awesome, but explanations woud be fine

[fozzylyon]

I'll have to double check this evening, but mine said it finished and then (re)mounted the disk's new partition. I had Disk Utility's gui open at the time so I saw the partion change there as well.

[i_am...me]

and how do we shrink it too?

[trancend]

I merged the partitions with the above instruction and when I rebooted, I got a b0 error. To fix this I used the Knoppix CD and launched qtparted from the shell to set the partion active. Iwould suggest using fdisk in Leopard to set the partition active before rebooting.

 

qtparted will allow you to shrink the partion - It will not allow you to expand it.

 

Acronis will now allow a resize on an HFS partition.

 

The only method that worked was the method above. I used qtparted to create the partition rather than vista or XP

[agent-squirrel]

i did as you said above and it did merge successfully, however disk utility says Capacity : 28.6 GB (30,746,064,384 Bytes)

Available : 620.5 MB (650,600,448 Bytes)

Used : 7.5 GB (8,073,551,872 Bytes)

 

is it possible to gain access to the rest of the space on the partition and not what it thinks is available.

[rock_lee]

hello,

 

i just installed the leopard flat image and it works (after reading and searching some hours in this forum and after deleting some files)

 

i did everything zuza explained in his tutorial to merge the partitions (also checking and repairing the rights of the "new" partition after the merging). after that, i marked the "new" partition as active. i tried that with Acronis and Diskpart. But i always get the message "HFS+ partition error" when i try to boot my leopard.

on my first disk i have installed vista. on the second disk leopard flat image.

 

i hope somebody can help me.

 

thank you,

rock_lee

 

 

ps: you have to excuse my english, because i'm german.