10.4.6 Secrets: Re-Partition your Mac Hard Drive

There has been of discussion about the great dynamic disk partitioning tool that Apple “included” in Boot Camp. Guess what folks, Apple added this tool to the Mac OS X 10.4.6 update. That’s right. Just fire up terminal.app! PPC too!

Welcome to Darwin!
imac:~ eric$ diskutil resizeVolume
Disk Utility Tool
Usage:  diskutil resizeVolume [Mount Point|Disk Identifier|Device Node] size
          ...
Non-destructively resize a disk. You may increase or decrease its size.
When decreasing size, you may optionally supply a list of new partitions to create.
Ownership of the affected disk is required.
Valid partition sizes are in the format of .
Valid sizes are B(ytes), K(ilobytes), M(egabytes), G(igabytes), T(erabytes)
Example: 10G (10 gigabytes), 4.23T (4.23 terabytes), 5M (5 megabytes)
resizeVolume is only supported on GPT media with a Journaled HFS+ filesystem.
A size of "limits" will print the range of valid values for the current filesystem.
Example: diskutil resizeVolume disk1s3  10G
         JHFS+ HDX1 5G MS-DOS HDX2 5G
Valid filesystems: "Case-sensitive HFS+" "Journaled HFS+" "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+"
"HFS+" "HFS" "MS-DOS FAT32" "MS-DOS FAT16" "MS-DOS" "MS-DOS FAT12" "UFS" "Linux" "Swap"

I came across this tonight reading Boot Camp First Look: Half Life 2 Video + More burried in the comments. Thanks David Weiss.

Tagged as: hard drive, mac os x, partition, Technology