Same System, Same Hard Drive, New Partition Scheme

[securityminded]

My mac book pro has a 232GB HD and is setup with two partitions of almost equal size. I no longer need to have two partitions so I am going to repartion it to one partition. I only need to restore one partition of the current two.

The source partition is 116GB but since I will only have one partition on the target internal drive, that partition will be 232GB instead of 116GB.

Is there a problem with using SD to restore the 116GB partition to the new 232GB partition? Anything special or important I need to do? Thanks!

[dnanian]

Nope. Other than making sure the partition is named the same as it oriignally was, and using the proper partition scheme (GUID/GPT), nothing special.

[securityminded]

That is exactly what I was wanting to hear! I didn't want to use migration assistant on a new install since I would likely lose activation of some of my programs I have purchased. Thank you for your insanely quick response. Now I can do this today :-)

[dnanian]

That doesn't mean you're not going to lose activations: that all depends on the type of copy protection used by the programs...

[sjk]

Originally Posted by securityminded

I no longer need to have two partitions so I am going to repartion it to one partition. I only need to restore one partition of the current two.

Disk Utility (at least in 10.5) supports limited non-destructive volume resizing so you might be able to delete the unneeded partition then resize the other one to use the space reclaimed from the deleted one. Of course it would be wise to have a backup in case of problems, though it would save some time if you don't need to restore from it.

[securityminded]

I just tried your idea and was able to delete the second partition and enlarge the first one to the full size of the hard drive. I am actually booted to it right now and it seems to work.

Before I modify my backup, does anyone know of any issues associated with modifying the partition structure using disk utility on leopard such as what I did? Just because something boots doesn't mean that there are no underlying problems so I want to make sure.

[dnanian]

There shouldn't be any problem, no: as long as Disk Utility was able to do it without error, you should be fine.

Note that any disk image backups will have the "old" partition size set as the maximum...

[sjk]

If I was aware of any issues of concern it's unlikely I'd have 1) done it myself, and 2) suggested it.

[securityminded]

Dave and sjk, thank you VERY much for the information. This is exactly what I needed and it seems to work with no problem at all! :-)