How to Increase or Decrease the Size of Your BOOTCAMP Partition in Lion.
If you want to increase or decrease the HD space on your Boot Camp partition of Windows, this is how you do it for Mac OS X Lion for free. Below is a an overview of the steps that need to be taken.
- Clone (Copy) your Window's BOOTCAMP to an external Hard Drive (HD) or to your computer if you have enough space.
- Delete the Window's partition on your computer.
- Repartition your computer to have the new size that you want.
- Restore your old Window's BOOTCAMP data.
In more detail, I walk through the steps here:
1. Download the free software Winclone from Roaring Apps Website (yes Winclone still works for Lion).
http://roaringapps.com/app:904
2. Now you are ready to copy your partition. Install and open Winclone. Under the Image tab, choose the Source BOOTCAMP in the drop down menu. Then click Image… Save your BOOTCAMP Clone to an external HD or your computer if you have enough space.
This will take some time so be patient (between 1-3hrs). You can see your progress percentage by pressing Command-L.
You should now see a .winclone file in your external HD that is about the same size as your BOOTCAMP HD. If you are confident that you didn't interrupt the copying process turned off your computer halfway through then you can move onto the next step.
3. This step is only applicable if you wish to decrease the size of your bootcamp partition.
Open Winclone, and select Tools -> Shrink Windows (NTFS) Filesystem or image and select the image which you just created in Step 2. This will enable you to downsize the image of your Windows partition.
4. To delete the partition on your computer open Disk Utility (you can search for it in Spotlight). Click the top HD on the left hand side, then click the Partition tab, and highlight the BOOTCAMP partition.
Click the minus sign and click ok.
5. Download the Free Trial of Paragon NTFS 9.5 (It is for 10 days, but you delete it after you are done) http://www.paragon-software.com/home.../download.html
This will allow you to create NTSF partitions. Before in Snow Leopard, you could get the Boot Camp Assistant app to do this for you. However in Lion the Boot Camp Assistant now does not let you partition your drive without having a Window's disk inserted. So that is why I found this workaround.
Install the Paragon application. Then go back to Disk Utility. This time click the plus button, and name your partition BOOTCAMP. Resize the partition to be the new size that you want it to be.
5. After the partitioning is completed. Open back up Winclone, click the restore tab. Beside Restore Image: select the .winclone file that you backed up previously, and click restore. This should also take a while (between 1-3hrs). Then you are done!
