Re-sizing OS X & Boot Camp Windows partitions

A friend of mine who is on the same Aeronautical Engineering degree as I has a MacBook Pro (purchased late 2010, the last model without a ThunderBolt port; with a regular HDD, not an SSD). Due to the nature of our course & the software required he mainly uses it booted into Windows 7, however he originally only configured Boot Camp for a 100GB partition; he now wants to shrink the OS X partition to around that size & expand Windows into the free space.

Both he & I assumed that it would be a simple matter of booting into OS X, using Disk Utility to shrink the HFS+ partition, then booting into Windows and using the Partition Manager to expand the NTFS partition into the free space. However, Disk Utility will not allow him to shrink the Mac partition in the first place (and, to pre-empt the obvious question, his Mac partition is not full, containing only around 100GB of data, if that).

Does anyone have any idea why the Mac partition might be locked in size?

Cheers for any insight

It may not be "locked" in size, but fragmented to the point that there are files spread all over the partition. A cheap but effective way to solve this is to use SuperDuper! to clone the drive to an external backup drive, wipe the internal partition, then clone it back over.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/com.shirtpocket/SuperDuper/Fragmentation.pdf

There is defragging software available that will do a more thorough defrag and optimization if that floats your boat. IMO, iDefrag is the best, with TechTool Pro's defrag module being a good alternative.

You can also look at iPartition, which will handle all the partitioning needs from within OS X.

Defragmenting your disk is always a good idea. But a simple solution to resize a Boot Camp partition is to use CampTune by Paragon Software. If the BC partition can be resized without defragmenting, this is the one utility that will do it. iPartition will resize the OSX partition, and CampTune will resize the BC partition. You can decide which to work with.

Cheers

SammySlim said:

iPartition will resize the OSX partition, and CampTune will resize the BC partition. You can decide which to work with.

Click to expand...

If I am reading the information on their websites correctly, then either of those is perfectly capable of resizing both partitions.

They may be. I have only used CampTune myself. Others on the forum have used iPartition but I can't vouch for it directly. CampTune is a little gem, however...

Cheers