Moving and resizing Windows/OS X partitions, multiple HDDs

[grumero]

I am running two disks in my Probook 4530s.
Disk one is holding my main OS X on the first partition and a second transfer partition (ExFat) which I can acces from OS X and also Windows.
My second disk (in the drive bay) holds in the first partition (NTFS) my Windows 7 installation and a second Mac partition (HFS+) where I keep a safety backup of my main OS X.
Now I need to enlarge my partition that holds the Windows 7 installation and shrink my Mac partition on the second disk.
The mac part would be easy and can be done with disk utility in OS X.
But how can I move the mac partition and enlarge the Windows 7 partition on my second disk without getting boot problems.
Any help is welcome.

Thanks in advance.

 

[RehabMan]

I am running two disks in my Probook 4530s.
Disk one is holding my main OS X on the first partition and a second transfer partition (ExFat) which I can acces from OS X and also Windows.
My second disk (in the drive bay) holds in the first partition (NTFS) my Windows 7 installation and a second Mac partition (HFS+) where I keep a safety backup of my main OS X.
Now I need to enlarge my partition that holds the Windows 7 installation and shrink my Mac partition on the second disk.
The mac part would be easy and can be done with disk utility in OS X.
But how can I move the mac partition and enlarge the Windows 7 partition on my second disk without getting boot problems.
Any help is welcome.

Thanks in advance.

Off topic from the ProBook Installer, so moved to new thread...

Since you have two disks, a better setup would have been to have all OS X related stuff (main OS X, backup OS X) on one disk(GPT). And second disk could have Windows stuff (Windows, exFAT) on the other disk (MBR). Then you could have modified the sizes in Disk Utility (disk1) and/or Windows diskmgmt.msc (disk2).

That said, you can still do it, but it will likely damage your Windows \BOOT\BCD and you'll have to repair it manually with BCDEDIT from the Windows recovery environment (command line). If you're not prepared to do that, then you should back everything up and start over with a fresh install of everything. Because when you have mixed Windows/OS X on a single disk, the only way to resize/move partitions is with a combination gparted and Disk Utility, perhaps with a little bit of cloning/restoring thrown in. This almost always makes the 'osdevice' and 'device' entries in the BCD invalid and they need to be repaired for Windows to boot.

 

[grumero]

Thanks rehab.

You're right. Your advise with my OS organisation on the 2 disk sounds convincing. I'll go for that.
Maybe for sake of the learning curve I'll give it a try to fiddle with the BCD.

 

[RehabMan]

Thanks rehab.

You're right. Your advise with my OS organisation on the 2 disk sounds convincing. I'll go for that.
Maybe for sake of the learning curve I'll give it a try to fiddle with the BCD.

You're welcome and good luck!

 

[veseliburek]

Hi, my question is also related to resizing and moving partitions...

I had three partitions on my Probook 4540s: Mountain Lion (120gb, with OS), Backup (120gb, cloned Mountain Lion when I first installed it) and Data (just a data partition). I bought a 240GB SSD, so I made an image file of the 'Backup' partition, and increased my 'Mountain Lion' partition to 240GB. Then I connected both the SSD and my laptop hard disk into my hackintosh desktop running 10.7.3, and restored Mountain Lion partition to the SSD with Disk Utility, and now my laptop won't boot, it reports "BootDevice not found". What should I do?

EDIT: replacing SSD with my old disk yields the same error

 

[RehabMan]

Hi, my question is also related to resizing and moving partitions...

I had three partitions on my Probook 4540s: Mountain Lion (120gb, with OS), Backup (120gb, cloned Mountain Lion when I first installed it) and Data (just a data partition). I bought a 240GB SSD, so I made an image file of the 'Backup' partition, and increased my 'Mountain Lion' partition to 240GB. Then I connected both the SSD and my laptop hard disk into my hackintosh desktop running 10.7.3, and restored Mountain Lion partition to the SSD with Disk Utility, and now my laptop won't boot, it reports "BootDevice not found". What should I do?

EDIT: replacing SSD with my old disk yields the same error

You need to install a bootloader to the SSD.

 

[veseliburek]

Ok, but how? Unibeast?

 

[RehabMan]

Ok, but how? Unibeast?

Multibeast or standalone Chimera installer.

 

[veseliburek]

Ok, so I repaired the bootloader on my old HDD, and restored it to the SSD again (chimera standalone on usb drive, then installed it to partition once booted), but when I try to boot my laptop with SSD inside (with the usb drive that has chimera on it), I get this screen:

Now what? Seems to me like disk utility didn't restore the partition all the way...

 

[RehabMan]

Ok, so I repaired the bootloader on my old HDD,

What was wrong with the bootloader on your old HDD? Does your HDD still boot correctly?

and restored it to the SSD again (chimera standalone on usb drive, then installed it to partition once booted),

So after cloning your HDD OS X partition to your SSD, you were able to boot it with your Unibeast USB (or USB with Chimera only)?

but when I try to boot my laptop with SSD inside (with the usb drive that has chimera on it), I get this screen: [/URL]

Now what? Seems to me like disk utility didn't restore the partition all the way...

Why haven't you installed Chimera on the SSD itself yet?