Resizing Lion Partition

[gburnham]

I've noticed that Disk Utility won't allow me to resize my Lion partition, no matter if I'm in Snow Leopard or Lion itself.

Is this normal for developer releases (just signed up for Dev Program a couple months ago) and is there a safe way to resize that partition? I ended up using Lion as more of a daily driver than I expected, and I don't want to have to go through the save to image, erase partition, resize storage partition, create new partition, and restore from image process.

Any tips would be great!

 

[mrapplegate]

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You tried to resize the partition while using Lion or SL?
Try booting from CD or in recovery mode in Lion, resize while it is not in use.

 

[mrapplegate]

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Misread your post. If you're in SL you can resize a lion partition. Just make sure it is not in use.

 

[gburnham]

Thanks for the help, but that still doesn't work.

I've the corner grooves to appear on the partition, and I have free space on the drive, but clicking and dragging the grooves in the partition section of disk utility yields no movement, and typing in a size manually into the size field only reverts back to the original size as soon as I hit enter.

This isn't as simple as it seems...

 

[mrapplegate]

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I'll post a screen shot when I can. It's tricky and when I tried it, the resized partition had errors so repaired disk and then resized.

 

[one1]

Sounds like when you added the lion partition you created an error on the disk. That's pretty much the only way DU won't allow a partition to be changed. As stated above you will have to install your SL disk, reboot, hold C to force it to boot from CD, then run DU and fix all errors.

 

[macmikey2]

I had a full 1TB partition on my drive and then yesterday I re-sized it, while it was live (running Lion) and it worked just fine. First I shrunk it, waited for it to finish shrinking, then added a new partition into the free space.

The only thing I can think of, other than corruption already mentioned, is the the free space you are referring to is part of another partition and it 'looks' free.

You would have to resize the other partition to a smaller one, make that space free, and then resize the Lion one to fit into that space.

You might also have to delete the larger partition (backing up of course) and then resize lion and then replace the backed up data into the remaining space. Not sure if DU will allow free space 'under' a partition to be used for the partition above a working/used partition.