Leopard: Partitions On-the-fly, 2007-10-29 - Your reactions

[linathael]

One can already from Mac OS X 10.4 resize partitions on a Mac volume via the command line “diskutil resizeVolume”:

YCO-BATIF-MacBookPro:~ yoc$ diskutil resizeVolume
Disk Utility Tool
Usage: diskutil resizeVolume [Mount Point|Disk Identifier|Device Node] size
<part1Format part1Name part1Size> <part2Format part2Name part2Size> ...
Non-destructively resize a disk. You may increase or decrease its size.
When decreasing size, you may optionally supply a list of new partitions to create.
Ownership of the affected disk is required.
Valid partition sizes are in the format of <number><size>.
Valid sizes are B(ytes), K(ilobytes), M(egabytes), G(igabytes), T(erabytes)
Example: 10G (10 gigabytes), 4.23T (4.23 terabytes), 5M (5 megabytes)
resizeVolume is only supported on GPT media with a Journaled HFS+ filesystem.
A size of "limits" will print the range of valid values for the current filesystem.
Example: diskutil resizeVolume disk1s3 10G
JHFS+ HDX1 5G MS-DOS HDX2 5G
Valid filesystems: "Case-sensitive HFS+" "Journaled HFS+" "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" "HFS+" "HFS" "MS-DOS FAT32" "MS-DOS FAT16" "MS-DOS" "MS-DOS FAT12" "UFS" "Linux" "Swap"

However, using the terminal is far from being straight forward for many users preferring the intuitive and rich Mac GUI, one would have to purchase a dedicated application such as iPartition.

With Leopard, the resize partition tools are now included in the disk utility, and we will show hereafter how to proceed.
First, select the partition to be decreased in size, then using the bottom right corner or the "size field", enter the new storage space value; then apply those modifications:


To add a new partition, click on the "+" button:

We called it "Ma Partition".
Then click Apply, and ... that's it! Done. However, one would not be able to mode a free space from one partition to another existing one; so partition management application can still be useful. This new feature seems to work for all Leopard-supported Macs (Intel, G4 and G5).

[translation by Linathael]