I've got a very nice MacBook Pro (albeit not the newest with a LED display), and a few months ago I installed Boot Camp 1.2b. I wasn't being terribly forward thinking when I created the partition and I assumed that 10GB would be large enough. Many little things conspired to chip away at this space and suddenly I was frantically deleting temporary files and uninstalling anything I hadn't used in a week to try and reclaim 100MB wherever I could.
Being a beta, the ability to resize a Boot Camp partition after installation apparently wasn't a high priority. Enter Winclone – a wonderfully simple program written by Tim Perfitt.
I didn't have too much invested in my XP installation so I decided to forgo any backups and skip straight to the imaging. I'm not sure if it affects the image process at all, but I had to mount my XP partition (use Disk Utility) before Winclone would show me any information about filesystem.
Since I was going to a larger partition I didn't select 'Prepare for restoring on a different partition', and I didn't bother with 'Make self extracting' since this image wasn't going to be used for ARD deployment.
After creating the image I used the Boot Camp Assistant to restore my startup disk to a single volume. Rebooted, re-ran the Boot Camp Assistant and created a 25GB partition. One more reboot, and then I fired up Winclone and restored my image to the new partition. Rebooted into Windows, let chkdsk run and and logged into see 15GB of free space.
The only minor glitch came when I tried to start up VMware Fusion (I'm not a big fan of Parallels) which uses the Boot Camp partition for the vmdk. Since the partition geometry changed Fusion couldn't find the actual partition, and there wasn't any way to re-detect the disk from the UI. My settings are fairly basic so I trashed the config (~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/<boot camp device>) and created a new one.
It took about an hour and a half from start to finish, including the installation of the Boot Camp 1.3 drivers.
November 22nd, 2007 at 7:29 pm
I've found myself in the same Fusion boat as you. How exactly did you create a new BootCamp config for Fusion?
December 1st, 2007 at 8:49 am
The easiest way is to delete the config file and create a new Boot Camp virtual machine. All the config file does is point to your Boot Camp partition so the only thing you loose are the VM's settings – RAM, number of processors, priority, etc.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
I too needed to resize, but my Boot Camp partition was FAT32. I didn't have to use any other tools besides Disk Utility and Boot Camp Assistant. As an added bonus, I got VMware Fusion using the new larger Boot Camp partition once I was all done using your tip. For FAT32 info I posted my steps for anyone that is interested. http://blog.stereodevelopment.com/2008/01/11/resize-a-boot-camp-partition-for-use-with-vmware-fusion/. Hopefully it can help your readers in a similar situation. Thanks for sharing all this with us.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:18 pm
[...] Resizing a Boot Camp partition | corey gilmore's blog (tags: bootcamp mac partition resizing) by The SJ-2000 Post-O-Matic Blogolator | posted in Random Trackback URL | Comment RSS Feed Tag at del.icio.us | Incoming links [...]
July 24th, 2008 at 6:22 am
Thanks for this post. I had exactly the same problems with my VMWare Fusion BootCamp Partition after having resized it. The hint that is given by the Fusion UI is very misleading because there is really no way to remove and add the disk in the settings dialog.
September 14th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Thanks for a great (probably the best) alternative to wiping, and re-installing Windows. Followed your recomendation, and other than the time WinClone was working, I probably didn't have to spend more than a few minutes to get myself another 20GB for Vista. Much appreciated.
September 15th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Great tip…Great product…Everything worked well and now my windows partition will hold what I need without worrying about space limitations…
March 27th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
I followed your steps however my XP drive did not increase in size???
I now have the same size drive with 9Gb of unallocated space??
Any suggestions??