Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

I successfully installed OS X on my T60. I have triple boot (via grub) between Win XP, OS X and Linux.

Now I would like to shrink the windows partition (I can do that with partition magic) and grow the OS X partition. But I cannot find any tool that would do that. Diskutil apparently can resize UFS+ only on a GPT disk, but not if MBR partitioning scheme is used.

Does anyone have an idea ?

Thanks,
Philipp

pippster, I have been using Partitiion Commander for a while and it is pretty versitile, I am not sure if it will do what you are prescribing but it might be worth a look.

Vcom

Edit: It does not specifically mention journaled.

Just piping in to say I tried to do this with Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 and it didn't work.

In what way is VCOM Partition Commander different then Acronis or any of the other PC partitioning utilities? None I know of seem to be able to expand an HFS+J partition right now.

I even called Acronis and they said they have no plans to build support for it. Guess they are a bit shortsighted...

What we need is a bootable CD utility so you can expand the system OSX86 partition while shrinking empty space or an NTFS XP / VISTA or Linux partition.

I resorted to imaging everything with Acronis, deleting everything re-partitioning larger OSX & re-installing it, then restoring the XP & VISTA partitions and resizing them. Pain in the [censored]...

Does anyone else have any proper success with this?

My plan usually involves partioning first then installing the OS's, partition commander has worked well for me in that regard.

IF you are talking about expanding the journaled partition into free space with either no file system or ntfs or fat32 I don't know if partition commander will do that (like I posted above).

Is that the scenario you are trying.


Mike

Actually, no, I am referring to the scenario where you have several OS's on the HD and want to expand/shrink things around. Like give OSX more space and take some from XP.

The only thing that would work would be a bootable CD with an utility that caters to BOTH Apple partitions and Windows/Linux.

Ahh, I see, well I'm very bored today, I have a sep drive for my t60 with OSX and two other partitions both NTFS. I'll see if I can possibly add some free space from one of them to the OSX partition.

No Luck, I deleted one partition and unfortunately it can't be seen in OSX, can't verify, repair etc.

ssimon, are you running OSX, Vista and XP on one partition, I am thinking about doing that myself, any problems.

LOL, I am running XP + OSX86 + VISTA + Acronis True Image all on one 100GB 7200RPM SATA HD w/ AHCI and using the native VISTA & XP bootloaders, but not on one Partition! That would not be possible

Make sure to have AHCI turned on in the BIOS and the v2.09 or newer BIOS version (ads Vista support) BEFORE beginning the process!

Process boils down to 6 steps:

1) Using OSX boot CD ( JaS 10.4.8 + ICH7R patch ) create 3 partitions as follows:

A - 1st Primary top of drive (15GB or so) for use by XP

B - 2nd Primary OSX partition (30-40GB) - use as much as you can as it cannot be expanded!!!! <--- my biggest issue right now!

C - 3d Primary VISTA Partition (30-40GB) - can always be "shrunk" / "stretched"

2) Install OSX and reboot to verify machine boots to 2nd OSX partition properly.

3) Install XP in 1st Pri. Partition and reboot, machine should reboot in XP

4) Format 3rd partition as NTFS but then immediately boot Acronis True Image recovery CD and create an Acronis partition at the end of the HD then activate it! <-- you can skip the entire Acronis step, but it makes backing up and restoring much easier even without a CD/DVD drive

5) Boot Vista and do a clean install onto what remains of the 3rd partition making sure to re-format it NTFS.

6) Boot into XP now (Vista Boot manager will add XP automatically but now OSX) and edit boot.ini to add chain0 and an entry for OSX. Add chain0 to the ROOT of your XP (C: drive). Also edit the apple "com.apple.Boot.plist" file to add a startup delay otherwise selecting it will boot the last default OS and you'll think something is wrong!

If you installed Acronis and it does not show up 1st at reboot, just "reactivate it"

DONE!!!!

Sounds like a lot... and it is but very straight forward.

The biggest remaining install/manage issues for me are not being able to stretch/shrink the OSX partition & the inability to erase the OSX partition after everything was installed due to a new OSX release or because I messed it up editing the kext files.

For the 1st stretch/shrink issue there is no solution that I know of right now!

For the erase thing, there are several undocumented things that will make it work on a new ThinkPad. You'll need to ensure the OSX partition is Primary and under/after another primary one ( in my example XP) and not after a logical one! Also, you need to use the SATA ICH7R patch from bikerdude (currently on on of the JaS DVD image). The combination of two will allow you to erase and re-install OSX on a new ThinkPad with SATA & ICH7R without touching ANY of the other OS's!!!!

You should also install MacDrive 6 in XP and 7 in Vista (use both just in case ) so you can edit the MAC files outside of the OS in case you mess things up patching things. Remember to boot with the CD & use the Disk Manager tool to repair permissions BEFORE booting back into OSX if you made changes from XP/VISTA!

Make Acronis backups to the LAN or external USB/FireWire after you got the 3 OS's operational and before making any updates/customizations so you can quickly restore things in case you mess it up!


Any questions?

Definately a typo there I meant one drive not partition.

I've got XP/Vista running happily, ran into some boot issues with OSX so I removed that partition and added it back to XP. Wish you would have posted this procedure a couple of days ago, but thanks anyway.

I got the same problem, dual booting XP and OSX. I only allocated 8GB space for OS X since I thought I would try it just for fun, but it turned out I like it a lot and would like to try more applications, now the thing is I couldn't resize the os x partition.
really hate to trueimage the entire drive and then do the resize and restore thing. my external harddrive just died with a 200GB+ stuff loss.
BTW, I frequently got "MBR #3 " error after using Acronis boot manager, anyone else got the same problem??

rehnui, you could make yourself a partition of just free space, resize XP and create a fat32 partition to put files and things on if you just need more storage space for OSX. It will show up as a drive in OSX.

ssimon wrote:LOL, I am running XP + OSX86 + VISTA + Acronis True Image all on . . .

Thanks for the info!

Kyocera wrote:rehnui, you could make yourself a partition of just free space, resize XP and create a fat32 partition to put files and things on if you just need more storage space for OSX. It will show up as a drive in OSX.

What other files / drive types can it read?

I don't know, the only configurations I've ever used with OSX is dual boot XPpro and OSX, with a partition to store and swap files between the OS's .

[quote="Kyocera"]I don't know, the only configurations I've ever used with OSX is dual boot XPpro and OSX, with a partition to store and swap files between the OS's .[/quote]

Kyocera,
Have you documented your install procedure anywhere? I'd also like to dual boot XP and OSX and I'm trying to figure out the partitioning scheme. I was hoping to keep the R&R -- really only because when doing a factory restore from the drive it lets you wipe a single partition clean, rather than the entire drive.

I'm thinking :
XP OS/Programs: 36GB NTFS
Data: 50GB NTFS
OSX OS/Programs: 30GB
R&R: 4 GB FAT32

From what I've read it looks like with XP installed and the OSX partition available, I should be able to install there, and then mess with chain0 to access OX. I'm wondering about the R&R partition -- if I want it recognized by the system and the Thinkvantage button does it need to be imediately after the primary XP partition?

Really appreciate any info!