Alternate to Disk Utility to Resize an Existing Mac Volume

Disk Utility allows you to resize existing volumes without losing data, but there are a few limitations. Disk Utility can decrease the size of any volume, but it can only increase the size of a volume if there’s enough free space available between the volume you wish to expand and the next partition on the drive.

For practical purposes, this means that if you want to increase the size of a volume, you may need to delete the partition below that volume. You will lose all data on the partition you delete (so be sure to back up everything on it first), but you can expand the selected volume without losing any of its data.

Process to Increase the size of a Volume

1. Launch Disk Utility, located at /Applications/Utilities/.
2. Current hard drives and volumes will display in a list pane on the left side of the Disk Utility window. Hard drives are listed with a generic disk icon, followed by the drive’s size, make, and model. Volumes are listed below their associated hard drive.
3. Select the hard drive associated with the volume you wish to expand.
4. Click the ‘Partition’ tab.
5. Select the volume listed immediately below the volume you wish to expand.
6. Click the ‘-’ (minus or delete) sign located below the Volume Scheme list.
7. Disk Utility will display a confirmation sheet listing the volume you are about to remove. Make sure that this is the correct volume before taking the next step.
8. Click the ‘Remove’ button.
9. Select the volume you wish to expand.
10. Grab the right-hand bottom corner of the volume and drag to expand it. If you prefer, you can enter a value in the ‘Size’ field.
11. Click the ‘Apply’ button.
12. Disk Utility will display a confirmation sheet listing the volume you are about to resize.
13. Click the ‘Partition’ button.

Disk Utility will resize the selected partition without losing any of the data on the volume.If a user is not comfortable with inbuilt disk utility of Mac , then he may opt for some other disk management tool like Stellar Partition manager.
The Stellar Partition manager provides its users the option to:

1. Create new partitions
2. Hide Partitions
3. Merge Free spaces to create partitions
4. Resize Mac partitions

Here is a screenshot to show the options available with Stellar partition manager.

10:11 PM - By Stuart Bell 0

How to Resize Partitions on Mac hard drive – Heres the answer

The Disk Utility version which comes with OS X 10.5 has some very attractive features specially the ability to add, delete, and resize Mac partitions on hard drive. Its very easy to increase the partition size , delete mac partition, and to split a drive into multiple partitions. The user can do it with Disk Utility, without losing the data.

As far as creating a new partition is concerned, the Mac disk utility is the best option. But, if a user wants to ...

1.Shift Mac partitions

2.Merge free Mac spaces to create new partition

Then he needs to search for some third party Mac maintenance tool. There is a software specialized for this maintening Mac partitions- Stellar Partition Manager.

Let me explain my words with an example:

Suppose My hard drive has a total size of 100 GB. There are three partitions os 30 GB each. The partitions are named like : P1,F1,P2,F2,P3.

Here P1, P2 and P3 are partitions of 30 GB each and F1 and F2 are free spaces of 5 GB each. Here , although I have 10 GB of free space at my hard drive but I can't use it. To sole the issue I need to shift F1 and F2 and put them together to merge them as a single drive P1,P2,F1,F2,P3.

With disk utility, its not possible, But I can do it with Stellar Partition manager. Its an easy to use Mac maintenance tool carrying all the features of Mac Disk Utility (create , delete ans resize mac partitions) plus many additional features also. The screenshot of this Mac utility software is given below.

In the above screen shot we can merge free space0, freespace1 , freespace2 and freespace3 together to make a new partition.

8:29 PM - By Stuart Bell 0