The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Shrink the bootcamp partition

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by superparamagnetic, Oct 21, 2013.

  1. superparamagnetic

    superparamagnetic Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    402
    Messages:
    252
    Likes Received:
    56
    Trophy Points:
    41
    I have a new rMBP that was initially setup with 125 GB towards OSX and the remaing 375 GB towards bootcamp. Now I realize that what I really want are two smaller OS partitions and a shared data partition.

    Is there an easy and free way to non-destructively shrink bootcamp to about 100 GB?

    Is it also possible to format the remaining space so that both OS's can read/write to it (say using exFAT)?


    Things I've tried:

    GParted Live - for some reason I can't seem to create a bootable USB that the macbook will boot from.

    Disk Manager in Windows - it won't shrink the partition past about 190 GB due to "unmoveable files." I've uninstallied stuff, disabled the page file, hibernation, system restore all to no avail.
     
    superparamagnetic, Oct 21, 2013
    #1
  2. saturnotaku

    saturnotaku Notebook Nobel Laureate

    Reputations:
    4,879
    Messages:
    8,926
    Likes Received:
    4,707
    Trophy Points:
    431
    The only program that is known to work for what you want to do is Paragon Camptune. There are no free alternatives aside from doing a format and reinstall.

    If you want to have a shared data partition, you can use exFAT, but there is one thing to be aware of when doing this. Create the exFAT partition from within Windows, using a cluster size of 1024. While OS X can create such partitions, there is a high chance of freezes and data corruption unless you set it up inside Windows. Don't know why that's the case, but at least it's a viable workaround.
     
    saturnotaku, Oct 21, 2013
    #2
  3. superparamagnetic

    superparamagnetic Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    402
    Messages:
    252
    Likes Received:
    56
    Trophy Points:
    41
    Well I went ahead and reinstalled Windows. Unfortunately OSX decided to eat up the rest of the partion rather than leaving it free. When I go into disk utility to shrink it, it warns me that "changing the partition map may make this disk unbootable using Windows." Should I actually be concerned about this?
     
    superparamagnetic, Oct 22, 2013
    #3