09-02-2009, 01:32 AM

Hello all,

With my recent purchase of Snow Leopard, I created a second partition to instal 10.6, while I keep my 10.5 running on the original. I'm in the process of moving files from 10.5 to 10.6. When trying to change the partition size of 10.5 partition to make it smaller to make more room for 10.6 I encounter this message every time.

"Partition failed with the error:

The partition cannot be resized. Try reducing the amount of change in the size of the partition."

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? It might surprise you, but I've actually done what it recommends, trying a smaller change. I tried as little as 5 GB, no dice, same message.

Thanks

09-02-2009, 09:10 AM

Why stop at 5GB? If the message says go smaller, try it! If it allows 1GB, then do that multiple times.

09-02-2009, 09:30 AM

So, you want me to do this action 600 times? I'm dealing with 1 TB. The point is... this shouldn't be happening. I should be able to just resize the partition without any problem.

09-02-2009, 09:36 AM

These may be silly questions, but if I may....

Have you run Verify/Repair Permissions and Verify/Repair Disk? Have you run fsck to do a filesystem check?

Are any other apps open while you're attempting to resize?

09-02-2009, 09:46 AM

Not a silly question at all.

I did try to run the permissions verify/ repair, but they are greyed out on that disk/ partition. I did run the plain verify/repair... I also thought to close all apps while doing so. Nothing at all was running.

When I first tried to create the partition I was going to instal SL on, disk utility kept crashing on 'arranging partition map'. I had to restart my iMac twice before it successfully created a new partition...

09-02-2009, 09:59 AM

It sounds to me like there might be some kind of filesystem corruption. My advice would be to do the following:

1. Turn the machine off.
2. Turn the machine back on and immediately press and hold Command+S.
3. This will start you in "single user mode", which is a text-only mode.
4. Type the following:

/sbin/fsck -f

5. Allow the filesystem check to run. When it finishes, if it found no problems, type:

exit

6. If it found any problems, run it again until it finds no problems.

Then boot normally and give it another shot.

09-02-2009, 10:47 AM

Yep. Did that. No dice.

There's like 500 GB free space on this partition, and I'd really like to make more room for my other one...

09-02-2009, 01:52 PM

Well, thanks for your help guys, it seems to have fixed itself...

09-02-2009, 01:53 PM

Cool beans. Glad to hear it.

09-02-2009, 04:59 PM

Ok, kinda premature. I fixed the original issue...

But. Now I can't change the size of my partition with SL. I can create a new partition in the free space... But, cannot modify the second one. It does not have the slider in the corner, and I cannot manually change the size by typing it in.

09-02-2009, 07:37 PM

Originally Posted by skujins

So, you want me to do this action 600 times? I'm dealing with 1 TB.

Sorry, can't read between the lines.

11-11-2009, 06:17 PM

Even though you may have enough empty space available, this error will happen when there isn't enough disk space unallocated ... meaning ... Try these things:

1- Empty your trash.
2- Do you have Parallels, Fusion, or anything else with a large sparse file or sparse bundle? You may have to delete or find a way to shrink that. The unused space counts, up to the maximum size of the sparse file.