Dusty Reagan » Mac OS X http://dustyreagan.com On Technology & Entrepreneurship Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:17:42 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 How to increase or decrease your Boot Camp partition http://dustyreagan.com/how-to-increase-or-decrease-your-boot-camp-partition/ http://dustyreagan.com/how-to-increase-or-decrease-your-boot-camp-partition/#comments Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:06:07 +0000 Dusty Reagan http://dustyreagan.com/?p=60 Continue reading →]]> 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.

]]> http://dustyreagan.com/how-to-increase-or-decrease-your-boot-camp-partition/feed/ 44