After realizing I hadn't given my BootCamp partition enough room on my new humongo-drive (upgraded from 120gb 5400 RPM to 320gb 7200 RPM), I went looking for a way to add a few gigs to it. The solutions were wide and varied. Most had to do with cloning the partition's contents, killing the partition, making a new one with Boot Camp, stopping the Windows install, and then restoring the old Windows install.

That was a lot of work and a lot of hassle.

Then I found someone recommending CampTune. It's a free download and "pre-release" but it works fine. It's a working Linux ISO file you can download and burn to a CD-ROM with your favorite disc creator package (or Disk Utility).

Once it's burned, hop into System Settings, choose the "Startup Disk" option, and set your machine to boot from CD-ROM next time. Boot from the CD you burned and you'll go into CampTune, which has a very simple interface for changing the respective sizes of your Mac and BootCamp partitions.

When you're done, everything should work as normal, although if you created a VM in Parallels or VMWare to use your Bootcamp partition inside OS X, you may need to recreate the VM.

That's it. Pretty simple, huh?

Don't be scared off by the "pre-release" status. It's been that way for over a year now and I think Paragon just decided the market for people wanting to resize their BootCamp partition wasn't big enough to charge for it after all, so they just left a good release candidate up as the free download and moved on to other projects. It worked well for me.

As always, don't mess with the internal structure of your hard drive without having made backups first.

Good luck! Have fun!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 9:33 am and is filed under Gadgets & Gizmos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.