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pwolfe1 · Jan 9, 2004, 12:51 PM

I have a brief question about partitioning. I have two partitions on my powerbook. They use up all available space. Is there a way that I can shrink the size of one of the partitions in order to install Linux? I miss having Linux around (just migrated to OSX.) I'm looking for a safe way to resize one partition without having to backup and reinstall. any ideas?

Developer · Jan 9, 2004, 01:13 PM

You can not change partitions without reformating.

Install X11 and play with Fink instead.

Chris Grande · Jan 9, 2004, 01:17 PM

The easiest way I found to do this was to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drive onto another then boot from the clone remove/change the partitions then clone back....I just did it yesterday to get rid of the 2 partitions on my PowerBook.

What I did was clone the boot drive then clone the second partition to a disk image. When I cloned back to the PowerBooks drive I just removed the disk image from the clone list. After it cloned back to the PowerBook I booted off the Internal drive and mounted the disk image off the external disk and copied its contents over.

pwolfe1 · Jan 9, 2004, 01:38 PM

Originally posted by Developer:
You can not change partitions without reformating.

Install X11 and play with Fink instead.

I do have fink installed, and while it meets some of my needs, it does not fulfill all of them. thanks though.

I'll check out CCC. any other ideas?

Millennium · Jan 9, 2004, 01:49 PM

You can't nondestructively resize HFS/HFS+ partitions, I'm afraid.

FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit used to have the ability to nondestructively shrink partitions, but you couldn't resize a partition to a greater size than the first size it had.

madmacgames · Jan 9, 2004, 01:54 PM

unfortunately this is one area where Mac falls behind windows. While programs that safely resize and move partitions on the fly are in plenty for windows and PCs, they seem to be nonexistent with Mac. My guess would be because Mac allows you to do a clean system install without loosing data, partitioning is usually not needed, while on windows partitioning is fairly popular because you cannot do a clean install and maintain data (so you keep data on another partition).

However that doesn't help your case any. You'll need to reformat to create another partition (to my knowledge there are no utilities for mac to safely resize partitions on the fly).

madmacgames · Jan 9, 2004, 01:56 PM

looks like Millennium beat me to the submit button

pwolfe1 · Jan 9, 2004, 03:00 PM

damn. not what I wanted to hear. at least one partition is just data. I can back it up to my Xserve then and just repartition it again. and keep the system partition as is. thanks for the info all.

CatOne · Jan 9, 2004, 07:03 PM

Originally posted by pwolfe1:
I have a brief question about partitioning. I have two partitions on my powerbook. They use up all available space. Is there a way that I can shrink the size of one of the partitions in order to install Linux? I miss having Linux around (just migrated to OSX.) I'm looking for a safe way to resize one partition without having to backup and reinstall. any ideas?

How about just getting an external firewire HD (maybe a 10 GB for $100 or something), and installing Linux on it?

pwolfe1 · Jan 10, 2004, 12:33 AM

you know that is not a half bad idea Cat. It would certainly be a painless way to solve the problem. But I truly do need to be able to use Linux at work and at home.