1

I installed Windows 7 on a MacBook using Boot Camp.

Using Boot Camp, I resized the MacOS partition to 20 GB and let the Windows partition consume the rest of the space - 128 GB. (Unfortunately this was the only option available with Boot Camp.)

Now I want to reduce the Windows partition to 40 GB and install Ubuntu on the remainder of the hard drive.

In order to do this, the first step is to resize the Windows partition.

This is the tricky bit.

On booting into Ubuntu Live and running gParted the entire partition comes up as 'Unknown'. I'm sure I formatted it as NTFS when installing Windows, but gParted can't recognize it as such, thus I can't resize it.

I did some research and it looks like the partition might be a 'Logical Volume partition', which is why it comes up as 'Unknown' and why I can't resize it.

So, seeing as I can't resize it, I guess the next best thing is to back it up, create a new partition and restore it.

(I've already installed quite a bit of software on it, so restoring a backup would be much quicker than installing everything all over again.)

Is it possible to do this?

jonathanconway
  • 567
  • 5
  • 7
  • 18

2 Answers2

1

I think I may have stumbled on the solution.

Under Control Panel -> System and Security -> Backup and Restore, there's an option on the left called 'Create a system repair disk'.

I've run this tool and backed everything up to a backup drive.

When I look on the drive, it seems to have created a VHD file as big as the amount of data I have stored.

I think this should work OK if I re-install a new copy of Windows.

jonathanconway
  • 567
  • 5
  • 7
  • 18
0

Take a look into the native OS X diskutil tool:

Disk Utility Tool Utility to manage local disks and volumes Most options require root access to the device

Usage: diskutil [quiet] < verb> < options>, where < verb> is as follows:

You can re-size and modify the partitions. Backups are good! ;-)

ForgeMan
  • 401
  • 2
  • 8