Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

addaddadd3 · Sep 5, 2007, 12:50 PM

I made a Windows partition in Boot Camp, but I found that I made it too small and I am running out of hard drive space on that partition, while my mac partition has alot of space to spare. Is there any way to expand the windows partition without deleting it entirely and remaking the partition? If there is, what (if any) common potential risks are involved?

Thanks in advance, perhaps.

richwig83 · 02:00 PM

VolumeWorks - Repartition Mac OS X Hard Drives Without Erasing Them, Shrink Volumes, Expand Partitions

Sorry just realised that might not work!!!

addaddadd3 · Sep 5, 2007, 02:03 PM

Yea, that won't work because it deals with Mac partition formats, and I need to expand a FAT32 Partition.

richwig83 · Sep 5, 2007, 02:09 PM

Maybe this

Boot Camp Resize Partition - Mac - Apple

addaddadd3 · Sep 5, 2007, 02:13 PM

Thanks! I'll have to talk it over with my dad, but I hope it works!

PaperNotes · Sep 5, 2007, 03:45 PM

Drive Genius *might* do this. Get in touch with them and ask first.

If not, if you have Vista installed there's a back up utility included with the OS that can back up the whole installation to a single image which can be restored later on. You can back up, then use Boot Camp installer on Tiger to remove the Windows partition, reinstall Boot Camp and Windows on a larger new partition, and then restore your back up image.

Personally I install essential apps to the internal hard drive and non essential stuff like games, demos and shareware to an external USB drive. That way I can keep the Windows partition small.

silver · Sep 5, 2007, 11:53 PM

I haven't come across any tools that can resize both OS X and a Windows partition dynamically. The thing is that they are 2 different formats. The windows apps that do resizing wont have a clue about the OS X partition and the same goes for OS X.

XP or Vista can't even read a mac partition without tools like macdrive installed in windows.

Your quickest and best bet is to do like PaperNotes said.

silver

hookem2oo7 · 12:50 AM

i would advise against any attempt to resize your windows partition due to the fact that no tool i know of recognizes and makes proper changes to BOTH the GUID partition table and the MBR partition table. I tried using drive genius to resize my windows boot camp partition. It failed.. horribly. It left me with a GUID partition table with an HFS+ partition being overlapped with a windows partition. Drive genius has no regard for the MBR data that is written in for Boot camp to function properly. I had to use that MBR data (which had the proper geometries for the partitions) to rebuild my GUID table in a terminal miracle.

I finally ended up creating an image of the windows partition with disk utility, deleting the windows partition and re-partitioning with boot camp. I then had to let windows setup to go thorough its initial installation so it could format the new partition and set the active flag in the MBR table. After that I rebooted into OS X, deleted everything on the windows partition and then restored the image back to the new partition. This worked well for me with XP with the only side effect being that windows sees a ton of "desktop.ini" files that don't have the proper hidden attributes. Of course, this can only be accomplished if your windows partition is FAT32 so OS X can write to it.

ghporter · Sep 6, 2007, 09:27 AM

I believe that the process richwig83 and hookem2oo7 link to/discuss is about the only "reliable" way to get this done. There are no Windows products that I know of that even recognize the Mac's HFS+ file system partitions, and while OS X recognizes both NTFS and FAT32 partitions, resizing them is problematic-OS X cannot WRITE to NTFS partitions, and will refuse to touch one, while there are far too many potential problems in manipulating a bootable FAT32 partition to depend on doing it safely.

ibook_steve · Sep 6, 2007, 01:37 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

I believe that the process richwig83 and hookem2oo7 link to/discuss is about the only "reliable" way to get this done. There are no Windows products that I know of that even recognize the Mac's HFS+ file system partitions, and while OS X recognizes both NTFS and FAT32 partitions, resizing them is problematic-OS X cannot WRITE to NTFS partitions, and will refuse to touch one, while there are far too many potential problems in manipulating a bootable FAT32 partition to depend on doing it safely.

Doesn't MacDrive recognize HFS+? When I'm in BC, I can see my OS X partition fine with this.

Steve

PaperNotes · Sep 6, 2007, 02:08 PM

Originally Posted by ibook_steve

Doesn't MacDrive recognize HFS+?
Steve

That's what it is for. It was originally written to allow Windows users to mount an iPod before they became available for Windows.

silver · Sep 7, 2007, 02:57 AM

Like I wrote in my last post, MacDrive reads OS X partitions in XP and Vista. Without it the OS X drives or partitions wont mount.

If your drive is NTSF then OS X can read from it but cant write to it unless you use NTFS-3G which is no longer being developed.

Now if you have a FAT32 drive then OS X can read and write to it. But FAT32 has problems writing files larger than 4 gigs(single file such as a DVD backup or something). Smaller files no problems.

silver

ghporter · Sep 7, 2007, 08:10 AM

I don't know that MacDrive would allow a partitioning package to manipulate an HFS+ partition-in fact, I think that there is a huge difference between being able to interact with a file system and manipulating the underlying partition. This sort of tinkering is something that just scares the crap out of me; it's very much terra incognita because of the lack of top-to-bottom support for either partition structure in the other OS. The safe and dependable way is to image the Windows partition, delete it and then create a new one of a different size, and then restore the image. Not "on the fly," but definitely safe.