Resizing this particular partition, Mac OS

Question

I am currently running on Apple Mac OSX Lion 10.7 (11A480b) and I am trying to resize my partitions on the disk for one of our servers. I already downsized a previous installation of Mac OSX Lion Server, which in the meanwhile was used as swap-disk for handling temporary overflow of incoming data which could not be transferred in the infrastructure while new data was being stored. After downsizing the partition from 860GB or so to 212.33GB, the partition that was initially meant to be resized could not be changed from the disk-utility.

I have a partition called Macintosh HD, previously quite big, a partition called Recovery HD, the operating system's disk, and a Windows 7 partition containing Windows 7 for diagnostic reasons. In the attachment it seems obvious, that after downsizing Macintosh HD to 212.33GB, Recovery HD cannot be upsized onto the space which initially was being used by Macintosh HD. There's only the option to create a new partition.

Here's a screenshot:

enter code here

Is there any actual way to resize Recovery HD onto the space of the previous Macintosh HD?

@Chopper3: why not migrate this to apple or superuser instead? — Caleb, Jun 10 '11 at 13:26
What makes you think they want a question based on unreleased code either - we try to be nice neighbours to the other SO sites. — Chopper3, Jun 10 '11 at 13:33

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:14

1

The problem is not new to Lion. See this similar question, When can I adjust partition sized in Leopard?.

One way, which will almost certainly work but is a pain, is to:

copy all the data in the partition (or make a disk image of it)
delete the partition
re-create the partition, using as much space as you'd like
restore the data

Here's hoping there is a better way.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:14

Community

1

answered Jun 09 '11 at 21:14

Clinton Blackmore

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This made my day. Thank you, however, it took 5 hours. =) – 19h Jun 11 '11 at 20:28
@kenansulayman I'm glad it worked for you. – Clinton Blackmore Jun 13 '11 at 20:23

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 10 '11 at 12:22

You need to be able to move the partition, so that the free space is located after it instead of before it. Some disc partitioning utilities have this capability. Others do not. Some know it by different names. In Terabyte's BootIt NG, for example, this would be sliding a partition.

Resizing this particular partition, Mac OS

2 Answers2