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WalnutSpice

Suspended
Original poster
Jun 21, 2015
456
92
Canton, Oh
So on my MacBook I have two partitions, one for Snow Leopard at 200GB in size, the last 30GB went to the El Capitan beta. I ~need~ both operating systems. Now the problem, 30GB. El Capitan needs way more. Im booted into the recovery partition and this lovely new disk utility will allow me to resize any damn partition except the el Capitan one. I tried expanding the drive under snow leopard but it tells me I need a newer OS to do it. I don't know what to do except delete El Capitan as a hole and reinstalling it on a bigger partition. This is not "simplicity" this is crippling a tool that was never broken. Any suggestions? I really don't want to have to reinstall Photoshop and etc.
 

simonsi

Contributor
Jan 3, 2014
4,851
735
Auckland
Has your El Capitan installation converted your drive to Core Storage? That can be checked in Disk Utility, select the EC partition and see if it is described as a "Logical Volume" at the bottom of the DU window.

If it is then you can possibly revert it to a normal HFS+ volume but I don't have the instructions to hand although there are several threads on here with them in...
 

WalnutSpice

Suspended
Original poster
Jun 21, 2015
456
92
Canton, Oh
Has your El Capitan installation converted your drive to Core Storage? That can be checked in Disk Utility, select the EC partition and see if it is described as a "Logical Volume" at the bottom of the DU window.

If it is then you can possibly revert it to a normal HFS+ volume but I don't have the instructions to hand although there are several threads on here with them in...
I've been attempting to do this for about a month. I posted that and figured f it, I'll bite some bullets and do some different methods to do it. I ended up doing what I needed by going from El Capitan Recovery, to Snow Leopard, then some in El Capitan. What I ended up doing was sketchy, last time I did something similar I borked my Leopard install on my PowerBook. Luckily it worked this time. But it took me about 30 minutes to do this. If El Capitan still had the Leopard style disk utility, It would have been in maybe 3-5 minutes. This is a problem that Apple needs to solve.
 

randomgeeza

macrumors 6502a
Aug 12, 2014
624
460
United Kingdom
I've been attempting to do this for about a month. I posted that and figured f it, I'll bite some bullets and do some different methods to do it. I ended up doing what I needed by going from El Capitan Recovery, to Snow Leopard, then some in El Capitan. What I ended up doing was sketchy, last time I did something similar I borked my Leopard install on my PowerBook. Luckily it worked this time. But it took me about 30 minutes to do this. If El Capitan still had the Leopard style disk utility, It would have been in maybe 3-5 minutes. This is a problem that Apple needs to solve.

If your El Cap partition is only up to 30G, then CCC it... Arrange the new partition scheme that you want and CCC it back. Simples.
 

aldrinjtauro

macrumors regular
Jul 3, 2014
202
108
Birmingham, AL
You could shrink the Snow Leopard partition, create a partition between SL and EL, restore EL to that middle one, delete the last EL partition, and expand the middle EL partition to take that space. Make backups.
 

Evren Carven

macrumors regular
Dec 16, 2014
238
21
1. Login Snow Leopard and shrink the Snow Leopard partition.
2. Login El Capitan and expand the El Capitan partition.
 
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