increasing primary partition size?

[samisnake]

got lion installed on my 1tb hard drive.
have 2 partitions, 500gb each on that drive.
want to expand the lion partition to make it full sized, as in i want lion to be on a 1tb partition, rather than the 500gb it is now.

cant seem to increase it though.
did it in disk utility inside lion-didnt work
did it in disk utility on the lion installer- also didnt work.

any ideas on how to do it?
want to try and avoid cloning tbh

 

[Going Bald]

got lion installed on my 1tb hard drive.
have 2 partitions, 500gb each on that drive.
want to expand the lion partition to make it full sized, as in i want lion to be on a 1tb partition, rather than the 500gb it is now.

cant seem to increase it though.
did it in disk utility inside lion-didnt work
did it in disk utility on the lion installer- also didnt work.

any ideas on how to do it?
want to try and avoid cloning tbh

Is there anything on the partition you want to save? If not, then open disk utility and select the OS X hard drive - not the Lion partition. It should show you the 2 partitions in the right pane when you click on the partition button, showing you your current partition scheme. Click on the partition you want to remove. Click on the "-" sign below the partition scheme. You will get a pop-up asking if you are sure - click remove on the pop-up. Disk utility will convert the partition to free space. Place the mouse pointer on the lower right corner of your Lion partition, click, hold and drag to the bottom to include all of the free space. Hit apply. You should now have a 1Tb partition for Lion.
For more info on partition function of disk utility see http://macs.about.com/od/applications/s ... tysize.htm

 

[samisnake]

cheers GB,

the weird thing is that the lion partition is second on the list, so i cant expand it with that corner tab.

 

[Going Bald]

Ouch! Disc utility won't let you expand the partition for a very good reason - your partition info files are not movable and must be at the start of the partition, not the middle.
In this case you have 2 choices:
Easiest - clone Lion from the second partition to the first partition and then delete the second partition and expand the first for the whole drive.

otherwise - complete format of the drive and complete re-install either from a clone or from scratch.

EDIT: if you already deleted the partition at the front end of the drive (and it looks as if you have from the screen shot), and elect to use option 1, you will have to create a partition in that free space first, then clone to it, then delete the bottom partition and expand the top partition. if that makes any sense - might be easier to just start all over from scratch!

 

[samisnake]

makes perfect sense, thanks.
was trying to avoid having to clone the drive. guess its the easiest option though.

 

[idahobar]

Had exactly he same problem, used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone drive, but remember to install chimera/chameleon on the new partition or it will not boot.