Resizing and moving OSX partitions in Disk Utility

disk-utilitypartition

So, I have a Mac Mini with a 160GB drive (it's an old model but it's only for testing). It had 4 versions of OSX on it but one needed more space so I removed the oldest version (Lion) and want to keep it to "latest", "latest-1" and "latest-2".

I've got to the situation where I now have the 3 OSes I need and I've managed to resize the partition for the one which was full so it now runs. But I'm left with a load of free space that I'd like to split between the others so that they don't fill up either.

Disk Utility screenshot

Hopefully it's clear in the screenshot, but when I want to do this resizing, I have this situation where I can only select that single "partition" and I can't resize it. I can resize the Mavericks partition itself OK, but because that grey section can't be resized, I can't move it or resize the Yosemite/Mountain Lion partitions

mac-mini:~ user$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *160.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Yosemite                42.8 GB    disk0s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS Mavericks               50.9 GB    disk0s3
   4:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s4
   5:                  Apple_HFS Mountain Lion           37.7 GB    disk0s5
   6:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s6

diskutil from the command line doesn't show a block of free space, but I can see it in the GUI Disk Utility, I just can't do anything to resize that grey area to match the size of Mavericks, which I think I need to do in order to change the "split" between the partitions and add more space to Yosemite/Mountain Lion.

Any other tools I can try apart from Disk Utility, preferably freeware or time limited trials since I'm only going to need to do this once?

Best Answer

I recommend downloading a copy of GParted from here: http://gparted.org/download.php

Then either:

  • Burn that iso file to a CD and then boot from the CD.
  • Or, create a new partition on your disk, use Disk Utility to Restore from the iso file to the new partition, set that partition as the startup disk, and finally boot into GParted.

GParted is the king of partitioning tools.

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