OSX guru needed

[musicman691]

As mentioned in another thread here I'm once again testing the waters for using Yosemite in what is a third boot partition on my iMac. There were two partitions of roughly equal size on the system drive (2 terabyte) - one for ML and the other for Mavericks. I shrunk the two up to make room for Yosemite and therein lies my issue. When I shrunk the ML partition in OSX Disk Utility (the machine came with ML) to roughly 400 gig it left empty space I can't use. See attached picture. I tried all kinds of remedies found on the 'net but nothing has been able to reclaim the space. Short of wiping the drive completely and reinstalling everything is there any way to reclaim the space? Once I feel that Yosemite is stable enough for me I'll go back down to two partitions - one for ML so I can still run PT10 and B4II and the other for Yosemite (and everything else).

[Marcel Risberg]

Hi!

I don't understand the problem exactly. Are you not able to drag to extend the "Macintosh HD" partition? That should be possible by the looks of it.

Or is it that you want to extend the "Yosemite"-partition? In that case you need to move it first. But: OSX/macOS doesn't support moving or dragging partitions around. Instead, I copy partitions to physically other disks, erase the partitions from the original location and then copy the partitions back again, in my preferred order and size.

Pro tip: I usually empty my boot partitions as much as possible, from data which does not really need to stay there, before starting resizing and copying them.

Pro tip: Make sure your physically other disk is in order before copying the partitions.

* Also, if you name your partitions with the name of the OS I might be able to help identify your problem better.

And hey: Backup first.

Originally Posted by musicman691

As mentioned in another thread here I'm once again testing the waters for using Yosemite in what is a third boot partition on my iMac. There were two partitions of roughly equal size on the system drive (2 terabyte) - one for ML and the other for Mavericks. I shrunk the two up to make room for Yosemite and therein lies my issue. When I shrunk the ML partition in OSX Disk Utility (the machine came with ML) to roughly 400 gig it left empty space I can't use. See attached picture. I tried all kinds of remedies found on the 'net but nothing has been able to reclaim the space. Short of wiping the drive completely and reinstalling everything is there any way to reclaim the space? Once I feel that Yosemite is stable enough for me I'll go back down to two partitions - one for ML so I can still run PT10 and B4II and the other for Yosemite (and everything else).

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Marcel Risberg

Hi!

I don't understand the problem exactly. Are you not able to drag to extend the "Macintosh HD" partition? That should be possible by the looks of it.

Or is it that you want to extend the "Yosemite"-partition? In that case you need to move it first. But: OSX/macOS doesn't support moving or dragging partitions around. Instead, I copy partitions to physically other disks, erase the partitions from the original location and then copy the partitions back again, in my preferred order and size.

Pro tip: I usually empty my boot partitions as much as possible, from data which does not really need to stay there, before starting resizing and copying them.

Pro tip: Make sure your physically other disk is in order before copying the partitions.

* Also, if you name your partitions with the name of the OS I might be able to help identify your problem better.

And hey: Backup first.

I know what my problem is: I want to reclaim the 'empty' space created when I shrunk the MacHD partition (which had ML on it as I wrote) so that if/when Yosemite is stable enough for me I can use that space for Yosemite. I do NOT want to extend the ML partition. I still want to keep the ML partition so I can run PT10. MacHD is Mountain lion; MacHD2 is Mavericks and the third is Yosemite.

I keep my samples and recordings on separate external drives so only programs and utilities exist on the system drive. And yes - I religiously make clones of my partitions to an external drive.

[Sardi]

There is no remedy unfortunately. The only way is to plan ahead, but that's not always viable. I got caught out a few years back and so now I do things in a particular order, but again, that's not always possible.

The easiest solution is to clone the partitions to an image, format the drive, repartition as needed and clone back the images.

Seems tedious, but it won't take that long. Prob quicker than looking for a solution that unfortunately (AFAIK)doesn't exist. I spent a whole lot of time searching when I was caught out with this issue.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Sardi

There is no remedy unfortunately. The only way is to plan ahead, but that's not always viable. I got caught out a few years back and so now I do things in a particular order, but again, that's not always possible.

The easiest solution is to clone the partitions to an image, format the drive, repartition as needed and clone back the images.

Seems tedious, but it won't take that long. Prob quicker than looking for a solution that unfortunately (AFAIK)doesn't exist. I spent a whole lot of time searching when I was caught out with this issue.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thanks for the info. What I'm ending up doing (it's in progress as I type) is this: the former MacHD1 partition which has ML on it I dragged to roughly 500 gig; created a fourth partition at also about 500 gig and put Mavericks and s/w from my CCC clone on that. I then deleted the partition that had Yosemite on it and dragged what was my original Mavericks partition to the bottom which gave me roughly 1 terabyte. Now putting Yosemite on that along with my other s/w - I should have cloned the Yosemite partition which would have made things a LOT easier.