How to increase or decrease your Boot Camp partition

August 19, 2008
Categories: IT & Administration, Software
Tags: , , ,

Get More Twitter Followers With FeaturedUsers.com

If you’re running Mac OS X and Boot Camp you may need to increase or decrease the size of your Microsoft Windows Boot Camp partition, depending on what great videos games are out for Windows at the time. ;)

To accomplish this task without losing all your Windows data you need 3 things.

  1. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
  2. An HFS+ Mac-formatted external drive
  3. Winclone

To decrease the size of your Windows partition use the following steps.

  1. Make a backup of your Boot Camp partition from Windows. (optional)
  2. Run Winclone.
  3. In the “Tools” drop down click “Shrink Windows (NTFS) file system.”
  4. Follow the onscreen instructions.
  5. Wait… it takes awhile.
  6. In Winclone create an “Image” to your Mac-formatted external hard drive.
  7. Use Boot Camp Assistant to return your drive to a 100% Mac-formatted partition.
  8. Use Boot Camp Assistant to make a new Boot Camp partition larger than the file size of your “shrunk” Windows partition image, but smaller than your original Boot Camp partition size.
  9. When it asks for Windows disk, quit Boot Camp Assistant.
  10. Run Winclone again and “Restore” your Windows image to the new partition.

To increase the size of your Windows partition use the following steps.

  1. Make a backup of your Boot Camp partition from Windows. (optional)
  2. Run Winclone.
  3. In Winclone create an “Image” to your Mac-formatted external hard drive.
  4. Use Boot Camp Assistant to return your drive to a 100% Mac-formatted partition.
  5. Use Boot Camp Assistant to make new Boot Camp partition larger than your original partition size.
  6. When it asks for Windows disk, quit Boot Camp Assistant.
  7. Run Winclone again and “Restore” your Windows image to the new partition.

Kind of a pain, but it’s doable. I’ve altered my Boot Camp partition numerous times using the methods above.

  1. 36 Responses to “How to increase or decrease your Boot Camp partition”

  2. By Ryan Mitchell on Aug 19, 2008

    Nice! Thanks Dusty – I was thinking about installing Boot Camp again on my MBP when my new 320G 7200 rpm drive arrives this week, so this helps make that decision a bit easier. However, I might still leave most of that new space available for video projects – that stuff takes up TONS of space. Can one ever have too much hard drive space? :)

  3. By Dusty on Aug 19, 2008

    Absolutely not! Especially with the footprint of new software these days!

  4. By Kevin Hurwitz on Aug 20, 2008

    It was great to see a post from you this morning in my Google reader… keep ‘em coming.

  5. By Azhar on Sep 16, 2008

    Trying it out now, thanks!

  6. By Mig on Oct 23, 2008

    Thanks for the post.
    But if we restore the image with the winclone, it will restore also the orignal size of the partion…
    Is it possible to just mount the image and copy the files?

  7. By joshgaines on Oct 23, 2008

    why not just use the built-in diskutil resizeVolume command?

    http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/cli/nondestructively_resizing_volumes

  8. By brenden on Oct 26, 2008

    I am running into the issue that Mig describes.. I have the 30 GB winclone file, but the new partition is 85 GB, but once I restore.. it’s only 30GB again…..

  9. By Gerald Mann on Nov 4, 2008

    Trying it out now. Thanks! Gerald

  10. By NIck T on Nov 30, 2008

    From what I understand from the Winclone readme, if the partition is originally formatted FAT32 you will need to convert it to NTFS in order to expand the partition, otherwise the new partition will automatically resize to the original. Hope that helps!

  11. By Faz on Jan 11, 2009

    If the partition is converted to NTFS, then that means that OSX may extract files from that partition but not write to it. I have a shortcut that links me to my XP partition, on my OSX partition. I move files from both partitions frequently.

    If you guys always move files between partitions, then this may not be the best of choices. Otherwise, you can always convert the additional space into a backup partition.

  12. By Charles Coughlan on Mar 10, 2009

    Just used CampTune for Mac OS X on my Imac24
    http://www.paragon-software.com/home/camptune/free_download.html
    Its the pre release version but worked right off, just create a cd from the downloaded iso, get Imac to boot from it, follow the instructions and it worked beautifully, just make sure you know how to eject the CD when booting by holding the mouse button, before 10gb, now 150gb free

  13. By Tom on May 31, 2009

    I am a little newer to mac than what your explanation gave, but I do have win xp on my mac with about a 22gb partition and would like to increase but not sure I have ever done these steps:
    1. How to make a backup of the boot camp partition from Windows.? )
    2. this step seems easy enough – Run Winclone.
    3. In Winclone create an “Image” to your Mac-formatted external hard drive. How do I make a formatted external drive? can it be done with a USB external drive?
    4. Use Boot Camp Assistant to return your drive to a 100% Mac-formatted partition. Is this easy enough to understand when I run boot camp?
    5. Use Boot Camp Assistant to make new Boot Camp partition larger than your original partition size. Seems I can do this if I can removemy old partition.
    6. When it asks for Windows disk, quit Boot Camp Assistant.
    Run Winclone again and “Restore” your Windows image to the new partition. How do you formatt an external drive to these requirements, HFS+ Mac-format?
    Sorry but I am just learning.

  14. By jawahar Lal on Jun 10, 2009

    Great post.. it works great..

  15. By Derrick on Jun 25, 2009

    So I cloned my vista partition and deleted it through bootcamp before realizing I needed to shrink it first. Winclone will let you shrink the imaged partition, but its been going for about 2 hours now…anyone know if this is normal?

  16. By Kevin on Jul 6, 2009

    This worked like a charm on a Moacbook Pro with a 250GB hard drive – formerly a 10GB partition and increased it to 50GB – originally NTFS and stayed NTFS – thanks

  17. By kim on Jul 12, 2009

    Hi, thanks for this post. The instructions are great! I have a few questions though, that I hope you can help with.

    I also have a partition that was too large on my old machine — 60G partition, and I only used 7G — and now I want to move to a new MBP, and use only 15G for the partition.

    I believe I’ve created an image, and I thin I have successfully shrunk it — in Finder Info, it says that the clone is only 4G which sounds about right to me, given I only used 7G of the partition in the first place — but when I try to restore from Winclone, it says that it is 61G again, and therefore two large for the 15G partition.

    CAN you tell me why this is, and how do I fix it? CAN i fix it?

    Secondly, when I AM ready to install this image to my new partition, can you give me some clarification about how to do that? It says:

    6. When it asks for Windows disk, quit Boot Camp Assistant.
    7. Run Winclone again and “Restore” your Windows image to the new partition.

    Is that it? Will I be required to do anything else?

    And after that, I want to use my Fusion software – how do I get that set up? It was migrated from my old machine – will it operate properly or will i need to do something additional?

    I am new to Winclone, Mac, and Fusion, and all of this, so please, go easy on me!

  18. By Thanh on Jul 15, 2009

    I would just use gparted from a knoppix disk.

  19. By Tom Robinson on Jul 18, 2009

    How do you convert the partition to NTFS so it doesn’t go back the old size when you restore the WINCLONE file?

  20. By Max on Aug 6, 2009

    HELP!
    I did this and now when I try to boot up Windows XP it hangs just after the boot screen on a Black screen.
    Everything went okay until I tried to boot up windows.
    Instead of using an external hard drive I just put it into a folder.
    Can someone PLEASE HELP!!!

    NTFS
    Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
    Mac OS 10.5.7
    320 GB, 7200 RPM
    2.66 Ghz
    2 GB DDR3
    2009 imac 20″

  21. By Robin on Aug 15, 2009

    I am having a problem with increasing the disk size. Everything works fine until I restore the partition contents from the winclone image. On restore the partition resizes back down to the old 5 gigs again. Any ideas?

  22. By Robin on Aug 15, 2009

    Hi again, I just figured the partition resizing problem. You have to deselect the bottom three items in the winclone preferences. There actually is a warning abut this problem in the preference pane but I missed it. All is fine now

  23. By Robin on Aug 15, 2009

    I have egg on my face. Actually the re reinstall did not work. The new partition was resized the same as the old one again. It was just reported wrongly. I am giving up and reinstalling Windows from the CD. Luckily I didn’t keep files on the Bootcamp partition.

  24. By Randy on Aug 20, 2009

    WinClone is AWESOME!

    Here’s my question. I currently have a FAT32 partition with Windows XP (boot camp). I want to double the size of that partition.

    From what I’ve read, I’ll need to change the partition to NTFS (easy enough, using your instructions).

    However, how does this work when restoring a WinClone image that was FAT32? Can you restore this to a newly partitioned NTFS?

  25. By T Shanklin on Sep 3, 2009

    Worked for me – THANKS!!!

  26. By chuck on Sep 7, 2009

    can i still do this without putting the winclone backup on an external?

    as in restore it from my internal mac drive rather than external, because my external is formatted to fat32 and wont hold a backup image.

  27. By greenbird on Sep 18, 2009

    Worked great on Snow Leopard, thanks !!

    I didn’t need an external drive at all, just saved the Image within the Mac partition, no problem!

    and all this without restarting!

    better than camptune I reckon.

  28. By Katz on Nov 3, 2009

    hey I did everything but when i go to re-partition my mac itr won’t let me saying that files cannot be moved…

    Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format it as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again.

    …I am using Snow Leopard and have not saved the image to an external harddrive, just my documents.

    please help…

    Thx.

  29. By Aidil Omar on Nov 9, 2009

    Hi Katz, I ran into the same problem before.

    What I did I backup my entire HD using Time Machine and then erased the partition. Then I used Time Machine to restore my backup. After which, I was able to run boot camp again properly.

    Hope this helps. :)

  30. By aaaa on Nov 11, 2009

    If you’re getting a same sized partition, go to preferences and disable the LAST setting. It should be UNCHECKED.

  31. By Michael Rougeux on Nov 22, 2009

    Guys, you can read/write NTFS disks in Snow Leopard by enabling write:

    http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090913140023382

    Just curious why the need for an external disk? I’m in the middle of the process now, but should it matter where the clone is if you have the space?

  32. By steffeng on Dec 15, 2009

    Thanks a million for this article! It took around 1 1/2 hours to increase my windows 7 bootcamp partion from 32 to 200GB! No problems.

  33. By michael d on Jan 1, 2010

    great tutorial, thanks for the tips!

  34. By MACKEE on Jan 26, 2010

    I’m getting a problem, I made a 32 GB partition and I am trying to restore a 16.86 GB clone, but it lists Boot Camp as 16.85 GB….what’s happening?

  35. By MACKEE on Jan 27, 2010

    Ignore that last post, I have successfully mad a 32 GB partition and is shows up on my desktop, but whenever I try to clone it an error pops up and tells me to check the log. On top of that the partition that I just created disappears from both the desktop and the Finder.

    What’s wrong here?

  1. 2 Trackback(s)

  2. Mar 1, 2009: New iMac small xp pro partition - Tech Support Forums - TechIMO.com
  3. Jan 27, 2010: Restoring Boot Camp data error using Winclone - Mac-Forums.com

Post a Comment

© 2010 - Dusty Reagan - Powered by WordPress - Designed by XHTML Valid