Tag: Windows

How to increase or decrease your Boot Camp partition

Posted on by Dusty Reagan

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.

Need to keep your computer up and running 24/7? Then don't patch Windows.

Posted on by Dusty Reagan

I can’t believe this recent Windows patch fiasco. I recently scored a side-gig at a local business with about 30 computers and no internal IT person. My task is simple, tune the desktops and fix all the problems that come with aging computers.

Well this recent round of Windows automatic updates managed to hose at least 4 of my computers! These machines are running Windows 2000 Professional with PCAnywhere installed. Apparently this last round of patches triggered something that caused PCAnywhere to interfere with Windows control of the display drivers. When you click the “Settings” tab in the “Display Properties” dialog box you get a “Stop” error in the VGA.dll. I managed to find a solution to the problem here. This support article was written in 2003. It’s very strange that these computers have been running just fine with PCAnywhere and suddenly, after this recent patch, they succumb to an issue discovered circa 2003.

This is totally unacceptable. My reputation with this company is being threatened due to Microsoft’s flub. And I have found myself in a position where I have to defend Microsoft and my decision to keep these machines up-to-date and patched. I’m tempted to setup Window Patch Manager and wait to install patches a few weeks after they’re released. I know there are probably many other professionals with the same thought.