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I have a Boot Camp partition on my MBP. When initially setting up the Boot Camp installation I set this partition to be quite large but now I wish to utilise more of that space in the Macintosh HD volume.

I've booted into Windows and used Disk Management to shrink that volume, so there's now just over 200GB of unallocated space on the drive.

I now wish to 'incorporate' this unallocated space into the Macintosh HD volume, but Disk Utility (the GUI version) doesn't allow it.

I've also tried

Terminal > diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 0

I used 0 because diskutil tells me "A size of zero will cause a grow fit-to-fill." However, this command responds with "Volume format does not support resizing" and while that response might be very clear to someone else, I'm not sure what it's telling me. Is it because the unallocated space was previously formatted as NTFS?

Am I doing this the wrong way? Do I just need to tweak my Terminal command? What is the correct way to extend my current Macintosh HD volume into that unallocated space?

awj
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  • read this question to see what additional information may be required before anyone can suggest a possible fix - http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153523/resizing-dual-boot-partitions-in-yosemite?rq=1 & look at the answer to see how much fun it might be ;) – Tetsujin Dec 13 '15 at 13:10
  • Jeez, I'm not willing to use a partially-destructive or a totally-destructive method. Do I really have no other options to extend my volume? – awj Dec 13 '15 at 13:19
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    No. The 'official' way to to it is to uninstall Boot Camp, which will reclaim the entire volume, then reinstall at a new size. I'm actually surprised you managed to resize the volume from within Windows without it breaking the entire drive. That's a big no-no. – Tetsujin Dec 13 '15 at 13:29
  • Without the additional information requested all I can suggest is I'd backup the Boot Camp Partition with Winclone, remove the existing Boot Camp Partition with Boot Camp Assistant, create a new smaller right sized partition with Boot Camp Assistant and then restore Windows from the Winclone Image. – user3439894 Dec 13 '15 at 13:35
  • I ended up using BCA to remove the Windows installation, then reinstalling with the desired partition sizes. Not the best way, and it certainly wasn't fun, but I couldn't see that there was any proper and safe way to achieve this. – awj Dec 13 '15 at 19:17
  • @awj, I guess you didn't read my comment then as it was indeed a proper and safe way to do it and works too! OS X's BCA partitions and formats the BCP as FAT32 and Windows converts it to NTFS. Once it converted to NTFS Apple can only delete it as it does not natively provide NTFS Write ability with BCA and thus the need for Winclone or just redoing the whole thing from scratch like you did. That said, because you modified it in DM in Windows you probably took the better course of action in this situation. – user3439894 Dec 13 '15 at 20:31
  • @user3439894 Having done some research on winclone, there were some reports (can't find the links now, was looking at dozens of sites yesterday) that it doesn't always work (maybe I misunderstood as I was scanning pages quickly for something I wanted to read). Paying $40 for Winclone then finding that it didn't help me wasn't appealing. Besides, doing a reinstall of Win10 wasn't too laborious thanks to everything being cloud-stored and using Chocolatey for installs. – awj Dec 14 '15 at 08:00
  • @awj, I typically do not offer a suggestion unless it has worked for me and Winclone has, however the fact that you modified the partition with DM from within Windows, which should not be done on a Mac that also has OS X installed, the course you took was probably a better choice. Also a note with Winclone, I have not used it in a Core Storage scenario and if there are reports of it failing I'd imagine CS being part of the issue. Glad your back up and running and with not to much pain. – user3439894 Dec 14 '15 at 13:38

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Change partition size only with Bootcamp Assistant.

LexS
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