05-14-2005, 03:09 PM

I have a 37GB hard drive, which the entire disk allocated for OSX. I was hoping to shrink down this install, leaving maybe 4GB to install Kubuntu linux.
I got iPartition thinking it would allow me to shrink down the OSX partition. But it doesnt seem able to do it. Probably because Im trying to resize a partition that is in use.
Any ideas how I could go about shrink my OSX partition to make a little room for linux, but still save my OSX drive. Id rather not have to do a clean reinstall, if possible. Is there a way to create an image of my OSX install, then repartition the disk, and reload the OSX image?
Thanks for any ideas.

05-14-2005, 05:04 PM

You are correct that you can't alter the size of the startup partition with iPartition.

You can use CarbonCopy Cloner or Super Duper to clone your OS X volume to another device. Then partition your drive and copy the clone back to your new OS X volume.

05-14-2005, 06:07 PM

Would it be possible to clone the drive to a device over the network, such a samba share?
I would be able to use one of the programs mentioned to backup my drive, but, i still wouldnt have a way to respace my partitions. Would I just have to reinstall OSX, but creating a smaller partition, so I would have room for linux, and then after OSX is installed, copy the backup back to the system [i have a feeling this wont go to smoothly if im trying to copy the clone by to an active partition].
Seems like maybe I'm just better off doing a thorough data backup, and then doing a fresh install?
Thanks for the help.

05-15-2005, 03:49 AM

Again, you can't do this to the startup volume (what you are calling an active partition)

This is what I do (and have done it often)…
clone my OS X volume to an external firewire drive
start up from the firewire volume
erase the internal drive and create 2 partitions on it
clone the firewire volume back to the OS X partition
restart using the internal OS X volume

the 2nd partition would then be available for any use.

05-16-2005, 02:12 AM

awesome. thanks for clearing things up. I was totally forgetting that I could boot off the external drive after things are cloned.
Now the question is should I go thru all the effort just to be able to run linux on a seperate partition (its not as if i -need- it, osx serves me quite well).

04-12-2007, 05:49 PM

if you are done then you are. if not, i think you can use iPartition to create a linux partition but you need something called iPartition bootable CD. it is the same software but in different format that let u boot from CD and alter the disk you want to partition.

have a go at google.

04-13-2007, 01:24 PM

hello, you might check out the Ubuntu forums. They have a whole Mac section Linux probably has a way to do what you need on the live install cd.