Having trouble trying to partition the hard drive on my old Mac

April 15, 2013 5:07 PM

I'm trying to partition the hard drive on my old mac (model 4,1 running OS X 10.5.8) so I can dual boot Ubuntu. The problem is that when I go to Disk Utility and and select to partition the drive I get an error saying that the partition failed because there's no space left on the device, even though I have lots of space. This happens no matter how small I make the partition.

Does anyone have any ideas? I'm not very computer savy and the google searches I tried before coming to mefi didn't make sense to me.

posted by el chupa nibre to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

You likely have space but it isn't contiguous. You need a tool like iPartition.
posted by ill3 at 5:22 PM on April 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Boot from your Ubuntu disk and try using gparted to resize the partitions instead.
posted by chrisamiller at 5:54 PM on April 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Are you trying to resize the partition while you're booted from that partition? That can work in some cases, but isn't ideal. Try booting from another disk to do the resize, maybe an OS X installation CD, or an external hard drive. As chrisamiller notes, gparted should also work!

If nothing works, it might help to tell us what your partition setup looks like currently, in case there's something weird going on. You can get a dump of your partition setup by typing 'diskutil list' at the terminal.
posted by vasi at 1:02 AM on April 16, 2013

Response by poster: Gparted worked great!
posted by el chupa nibre at 2:03 PM on April 16, 2013