MacOS – What’s the minimum partition size for osx mavericks when dual booting with windows 8

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I used boot camp to setup dual booting between windows 8 and mac osx mavericks.

To get the most possible space for Windows 8, should I have formatted my computer first?

I was able to partition my drive as:

  • 205 GB OSX
  • 18 GB Available 295 GB Win8

It is a 500 GB hard drive.

If I formatted it first, could I have made the OSX partition smaller? If so, how much smaller?

Best Answer

OS X Mavericks requires at least 8 GB of free space to install to. At least 15% of free space is recommended for updates and other such things.

Therefore, the minimum space for OS X is 9.2 GB, or to be safe, 10 GB.

So yes, using Disk Utility to partition before you installed Boot Camp would have meant that you could have made the OS X partition smaller.

You can repartition now with software such as iPartition, which specifically works with Boot Camp partitions.

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