Installed windows 10 via bootcamp on my MBP running macOS Sierra, but I'd like to expand the Windows partition and shrink the macOS partition, avoiding a reinstall if possible. I did a search already, but the other questions I've found on this topic are 1) about windows 7 and 2) just suggest using WinClone or similar. How would this be done manually without the use of paid utilities? Edit: I've used gParted from an ubuntu live USB to resize the windows partition. The only issue now is that windows throws an error on boot. Online sources suggest using gdisk to somehow sync the GPT and MBR tables? (I have data backups and mac OS boots fine, so now it's just a matter of curiosity and avoiding a reinstall if possible).
Steps to install Windows 10 on Mac OS X using Bootcamp 1. First of all on a Windows PC Download ISO of Windows 10 using Media Creation tool and transfer the ISO image to your Mac.
Don’t ever touch the partitioning from Windows! No Windows app can figure out how it is being ‘fooled’ into thinking it’s in charge. There are only 2 apps that won’t simply break Boot Camp completely, Paragon Hard Disk Manager & TwoCanoes WinClone. Afaik, neither can yet handle APFS. Carbon Copy Cloner can safely back up HFS & Boot Camp partitions, but cannot by itself recreate them, you must complete the underlying formatting first. Apple’s own Disk Utility will not allow you to even attempt this. The Apple-recommend method is to completely remove Boot Camp & start over with a bigger partition size.
Indeed, it is a valid point. I've been on the other side of the table, having to work with people who either dont want to spend much money or they did the previous mistake and it is me who has to repair it by hand, thats why I allways try to find the non-conventional way. I've screwed many disks, but I only lost information once because dd didn't copy the disk properly but didnt throw a warning.
Since then I allways check manually if backups are done correctly and never made a client lose a single bit. Btw: removed the downvote and gave you a +1, considering possible mistakes from future users – Nov 21 '17 at 19:57.
You have to use a partition utility like GParted. If you are using APFS as filesystem GParted cannot modify it. You'll have to find a tool able to do so, and do the resize in parts, first the physycal APFS partition and then the Windows NTFS. If there's no software which automatically does it it involves a VERY HIGH RISK of data loss. Keep this in mind and backup your data (or whole disk) before. If you want to try the 'easy way' first follow this guide about.
It will only work properly if the NTFS partition of the Windows installation is a proper NTFS partition. Keep in mind that BEFORE doing this you'll have to shrink your mac partition using mac's Disk Utility.
It will not allow you to make the bootcamp bigger, but it will make room for you to enlarge it with MiniTool (or any other tool capable of working NTFS under the partition layout your HDD has). The full procedure is explained: Yesterday expanded my bootcamp partition from 50 up to 100 Gb using Mini Tool Partition Wizard Home Edition, a Freeware Windows Program after seeing this video: Note that I have OSX Mavericks, Steps are: 1) backup all your files (optional but strongly reccomended).
2) Using OSX Disk Utility resize MacintoshHD partition leaving unallocated space as much as you need to add to bootcamp partition. 3) Set Bootcamp as Boot Disk and restart the mac. 4) in Bootcamp with Windows running launch Mini Tool Partition and select the bootcamp partition. 5) Choose 'expand' option in order to expand the partition using all the unallocated space. 6) The program prompt to you to restart the mac for apply the task, cause is not possible while the partition is mounted and windows running. 7) Restart the mac and then automatically Mini Tool Partition will do the job in a 'graphic msdos like' form.
Now the long way around: First of all, before doing anything MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR HARD DISK. For zero risks use dd (diskdupe) to backup every single bit of the harddisk into a disk image. You can check how to do so. If you dont want to risk to reinstall everything from scratch make sure your backup contains the partition table and the partitions, or that you are totally able to restore that backup, even if you bought a new hard disk.
This is a critical step if you're not confortable with partition modification (its recomended even if you are). Whenever you touch a partition you are risking your data, and even though most times there will be a way to recover your info even if you screw it up without a backup, there are chances you'll overwrite important data and loose it forever. The risk depends on the operation performed and resizing is a particularly risky operation! If you are curious about what partitioning is about, you can check this to get some insights of what you are actually doing. Then you have three chances:. Install a partition edition software on your Mac. I'm not a mac user, so I can only give you one example, which I believe it is included in mac distros.
You can check to find more examples. All I could find on google was comercial software, but as I said, I'm not a mac expert, so there may be a GParted port around or something like that. Boot using a liveCD/USB like or and use GParted which is installed in the live distribution. There are many CDs to do this, like Partition Wizard, Partition Manager, Partition Magic, etc.
In order to use thid method you will check, which is a different topic. Do it from your Windows OS instead from MAC following a Windows tutorial. There are plenty around, like. Personally I allways use liveCDs to modify partitions, as they are much safer.
Because if you resize a partition you are using (from whithin the native OS) your system has to reboot and enter in some short of 'special boot envinronment' (its not that, but just to simplify) and resize the disks from there. Those aditional steps add many failure points to an operation which is enough risky by itself. If you can, allways resize OS partitions from liveCDs. And remember, make backups! This is a critical step, and deserves to be repeated over and over my post. MAKE BACKUPS!
I'm sure you can shrink (or increase) the virtual windows partition first and then the actual partition. I don't know if the guy who said it is impossible took all his knoweldge from youtube tutorials or he's an actual computer engineer, but as a compute engineer i'm telling you there's no such thing as impossible, specially if apple provides a tool to resize. However, take into consideration what he said and DO A BACKUP!
More questions about APFS resizing. @tetsujin This is for older versions: This uses disk utility and then partition magic,but could be gparted from boot disk.This guy does it in the wrong way using partitiion manager from windows. They changed the filesystem, but there has to be some tool to handle it, for sure, and if not, he can allways drop the info to a new FS. If you are right (which i highly doubt) and there's no tool to do it in a single step with the new FS you could enlarge the APFS and THEN the virtual partition underlying. – Nov 21 '17 at 19:19.
You can run Windows on a Mac. That's a big selling point for Apple, which gives this feature a marquee position on its page. Apple pitches it as the way to run 'specialty software.'
You know, 'that one Windows application. That's not available for the Mac.' That's actually a pretty compelling pitch for me. I have a handful of Windows programs that don't have Mac alternatives, and I have. So if a virtual machine can handle both Windows and OS X apps gracefully, I would have a much easier time moving back and forth.
On the Mac, I originally installed Windows 7. But after a recent memory and disk upgrade I've been looking at virtualization software for OS X, which allows me to run Windows without having to first shut down OS X. It's not exactly seamless, but it works. Before you try it, though, you should learn about the costs-some of them not so obvious at first glance. There's the monetary cost of software, of course, but there are also some hidden performance costs. In this post I discuss both. The cost of software.
You can pay for virtualization software or find a free alternative, but Windows itself isn't free. And if your can't-live-without it Windows app is Microsoft Office or an accounting program or a point-of-sale system, well, you have to pay for that too. Let's run the tape:. Windows 7 Professional $250 Under Windows license terms, the only option a normal consumer has for Windows 7 in a VM on a Mac is what's called a Full Packaged Product (FPP) license.
(Upgrades are only allowed if you are replacing the installed copy of OS X or a previous version of Windows installed in a VM. OEM copies are allowed only on new physical hardware.) At the Microsoft Store, costs $300. You can find it discounted from legitimate resellers for roughly $250, so let's use that price.
Virtualization software $0-80 I've been testing. A full license for either one costs $80. I've been able to find discounts that take the cost into the sub-$60 range.
Is a free option, but when I looked at it a few months ago it was behind the others in terms of Windows support. If you plan to use Boot Camp exclusively, you can skip this line item.
That's a bare minimum of $250 on top of the premium cost you pay for Apple's hardware. It's at least $300 if you use commercial virtualization software, and possibly much more if you need to pay for additional licenses for Windows apps. The hidden performance costs What I found even more interesting was the decrease in performance that you get when you run Windows on Apple hardware. To measure performance, I looked at the raw data that Windows captures when you run the Windows System Assessment tool (WinSAT.exe). You can look at the five numbers that make up the Windows Experience Index (WEI), but the detailed numbers are much more illuminating. I looked at these numbers on my late-2009 Mac Mini, with a decent Core 2 Duo CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a 7200RPM Seagate Momentus XT hybrid disk. The latter two pieces of the puzzle are recent upgrades, with the disk being a substantial improvement over the original sluggish 5400 RPM drive.
I have Windows running in Boot Camp and in multiple virtual machines. In addition, I collected performance information from my colleagues Zach Whittaker and Christopher Dawson, both of whom have new MacBook Airs running Windows on the side. I was shocked at the differences in performance. Here are the side-by-side WEI scores for all systems. The top group shows scores for my Mac Mini; the bottom chart shows the two MacBook Airs.
All of these scores are on a scale of 1-7.9. The color coding is simple, bright green is the best, dark red is the worst, with yellow in the middle. The two MacBook Airs have different CPUs, but both have the same 128 GB SSD and Intel onboard graphics. The default VM configuration sets aside a mere 1 GB of RAM for the VM.
For the optimized setup, I increased RAM to 3 or 4 GB. Click to enlarge chart You can see at a glance that virtualization takes a significant chunk of CPU capability away. On my system, the Boot Camp installation scored 308 MB/s for the CPUCompression2Metric and 470.9 MB/s for the Encryption2Metric, versus 152.5 and 223.0 for the same metric under Parallels. For those two tasks, you're essentially losing half of the CPU by running in a VM. The difference is even more striking in the two MacBook Airs, where the different CPU models account for part of the gap but the VM adds a further penalty.
Likewise, graphics performance in a VM suffers because Windows is unable to use the native Nvidia or Intel drivers and instead has to pass everything through virtualized graphics adapters. Both VMware and Parallels have decent drivers capable of delivering Aero support with transparency and other effects.
All of those effects are smooth when running under Boot Camp, but I can see tearing and jerky movements in a virtual machine. The lower scores reflect the differences accurately Surprisingly, one area of Windows performance actually improves dramatically in a virtual machine. Look at the difference in performance on the Mac Mini, where the WEI score goes from 5.9 to 6.9.
The Random Read score is 1.2 MB/s under Boot Camp but increases to 2.7 MB/s when using Parallels. That's a huge improvement.
On the two MacBook Airs, you can really see the hit that the Intel graphics take when they're forced to run using virtual graphics drivers. The penalty is even worse because the VM only has 1 GB of RAM available, whereas the Boot Camp installation has 4 GB to work with. And once again you can see the effects of storage drivers. Under Boot Camp, the 128 GB SSD delivers Random Read throughput of 49.5 MB/s. In a VM, the same score is 182.9 MB/s, a fourfold increase. In Boot Camp, the SSD in that MacBook Air performs far worse than an SSD should.
By way of contrast, a Samsung SSD in a 2009-vintage Dell notebook earned 130.2 MB/s on that score. The SATA III SSD in the Dell desktop I'm using to write this post scores 209.2 MB/s.
No matter which way you run Windows on a Mac, you're going to give something up If you use Boot Camp, Windows will probably get as much as it can from the CPU and graphics adapter, but you'll pay a performance penalty in terms of hard disk speed. By contrast, virtualizing Windows unlocks the full disk speed, especially with SSDs, but you pay a penalty in CPU and graphics muscle. Related Topics. By registering you become a member of the CBS Interactive family of sites and you have read and agree to the,.
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