[dew912]

Hello all!

I already have Snow Leopard running, occupying my entire hard drive in a single partition. How would I go about shrinking the existing partition on my hard drive and dual booting with windows 7? Has anyone done this in this order yet?

Thanks!

[mattchiro]

disc utility - go to partitions. click the '+' sign. That will divide the hdd into 2 partitions

[waldo_pepperjack]

I've never done this in OS X (only in Linux, with the program GParted, or with the command-line Parted), but you may want to read this thread ...

Resizing HFS+ partition

apparently it can be done ... though I was thinking that adding partitions was a destructive process, it seems that DiskUtility now may be able to do this in a nondestructive manner.

Make sure you backup your data __before__ you start the process.
------------------------------------------

yup, this article hits the nail on the head ...
Using DiskUtility for NonDestructive Resizing, Addition of Partitions

I had been using Ubuntu & Gentoo soooo much the last 2 or 3 years, that my familiarity w/ OS X had "atrophied" somewhat ... working w/ my Mini10v and this site has been a nice way to come back into the OS X fold.

[PWR2WH8]

i'm in the same boat. i already have a partition for win7 made. do i just install win7 setup the boot loader?

[khua]

If I want both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard to share some files, should I create 3 partitions? One more windows (ntfs), one more osx (special apple formatting), and one for the shared files (fat32)?


Is that right?

[PWR2WH8]

take not the the fat32 has file size limits when transferring. iirc, you can read/write ntfs in mac with additional software.

[khua]

so this means 1 partition for osx, 1 for ntfs for windows, and another ntfs for sharing?

how do you get mac to read ntfs?

[dew912]

after the partition for windows is created, do you just go ahead and install win7? I assume this would overwrite the mbr. if that is the case, do you just install a windows program such as freebsd to enable multi-boot? thanks for all the help!
-Dan

[mort]

I'm in the same boat as the others. VERY interested if others have done this and had it work properly. I'd like not to have to wipe a perfectly functioning OSX install and start over. That's way too much of a pain in the butt. I've already had Disk Utility add a 25GB FAT32 partition in addition to the HFS+ partition occupied by OSX. Now how do it install Windows 7 and have it play happy with Chameleon?

[jaraeez]

I've been in a simliar situation a while back where I had OSX taking the whole HD & wanted to dual boot with Win7.

At first I thought I'd shrink the drive as suggested above & used 'gparted' (had a TM backup just in case) which worked fine (took forever though) & in the end Win7 wouldn't install no matter what I tried.

Ending up following one of the dual booting 'How To's' & reformatted the whole drive. Did the Win7 install then restored my TM backup to the other partition & reinstalled the bootloader etc. - All now working fine