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Dev Juice: Help me recover my beta partition

by Erica Sadun Jul 18th 2011 at 11:00AM

Dear Dev Juice,

I was in the Lion beta program. Now that 10.7 is about to release I want to reclaim the small partition I added to my laptop that I was using to test it.

How do I do this?

Shawn

Dear Shawn,

Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility) makes it easy to recover OS partitions assuming you have a standard scheme where you partitioned off a chunk of your drive to host the beta.

Assuming you did just that, you'll have a primary partition occupying most of your disk, and a secondary partition after that. Back up everything you can, especially on the second partition.

Boot on your primary partition that you have now updated to Lion. Open Disk Utility and select your hard drive (not the partitions under the hard drive) and open the Partition tab. Your layout should have the primary partition on top, the secondary below it.

Select the secondary partition and delete it by clicking the - (minus) button. Make sure you read the messages that Disk Utility presents you. You only want to remove the secondary partition, you do not want to affect the primary. If you get any message other than something like 'this will only remove the secondary partition and leave the primary unaffected', stop and re-group. Otherwise, go ahead and perform the removal. (You did backup, yes?)

Next, resize your primary partition to reabsorb that extra space. Edit the Size field by entering 9999 GB (or whatever). When you press return, Disk Utility will automatically change that to match the actual available space. Click Apply.

It can take several minutes for Disk Utility to verify and apply the changes. But it is able to make the changes (as it did with the original partition) in-place. You will not need to reboot afterwards, although you may want to just for sanity's sake.

Good luck and happy developing!



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Need to reclaim that partition for the beta of Lion? Here's how.
 

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12 Comments

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www.explorefeed.com

Thank you for the nice post... I'll sure make a post on my offcial tech blog at - http://www.explorefeed.com

July 20 2011 at 4:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
alansky

Has anyone tried Josh the Greek's suggestion to erase the beta partition before attempting to delete it? Please report the result if you do.

July 18 2011 at 12:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Vera Comment

TUAW - do you make up these questions?

How can someone savvy enough to run the GM not know how to clean up a partition?

July 18 2011 at 11:52 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Vera Comment's comment
cookingscience

The answers are made up (untested) too. Just as speculation about what might happen is reported as news, speculation about technical solutions is treated as authoritative advice on how to solve a problem.

July 18 2011 at 1:13 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Unknown

Unfortunately it's not this simple. Since the partition was used by a newer version of Mac OS X, you can't undo the partition from a Snow Leopard partition. You're going to have to boot from a Lion installer and erase the partition there.

July 18 2011 at 11:35 AM Report abuse +1 rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Unknown's comment
Hell Angel

I had this exact problem.... except i deleted my snow leopard partition (which was on top in the disk utility partition gui) After doing that there was no way for me to extend my lion partition back up, because the dragging thing was at the bottom right and not at the top... I was really befuddled at this honestly.... I tried backing up with time machine, but that did nothing cause it was taking forever at preparing backup. So later, after thinking more about this, i went and downloaded carbon copy cloner, and decided to clone my entire lion gm release back up to the top, partition. While it did that I had no idea it would work, but after it did, I booted back up into my newly cloned lion partition, and deleted my old lion partition. After that I could drag my newly created lion partition back down to the unallocated free space, (created after deleting my old lion partition). After that I was done... then i did the usual, reset pram, verify disk, and repair disk. stuff..

So in short if you want to keep your lion gm partition:
Step one: Copy all your snow leopard files onto the lion partition
Step two: Install any applications you think you need to install.
Step three: erase your snow leopard partition
Step four: Download carbon copy cleaner (free)
Step 5: Create a new partition from the free space of snow leopard partition
Step 6: Copy your entire lion partition with carbon copy cloner back up top (new partition)
Step 7: wait
Step 8: After carbon copy is done boot back into the newly created partition ( should look exactly the same as your lion build)
Step 9: Start disk utility and delete the old lion partition
Step 10: drag your new lion partition back down into the unallocated space
Step 11: repair disk, verify disk permissions and all that good stuff

July 18 2011 at 4:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
JKT

What's amazing to me is that Disk Utility gives a rat's patoot what OS is on a partition. Newer? SO WHAT? It's a partition...a container. We're issuing commands on the container level, not the file level. So just do what we tell you to do and remove the darn thing!

July 19 2011 at 10:51 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
evanskis

I'm pretty sure you might need to wait until Lion is released to do this, because if I try to remove my Lion partition while on my Snow Leopard partition, it doesn't allow me because the Lion partition has a newer OS. So I'm just gonna wait until I get Lion on my primary partition.

July 18 2011 at 11:29 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to evanskis's comment
Kiley C.

In the same boat. My guess is that you can boot the Lion beta or GM installer disk image (or disk, if you made a bootable external HD like I did) and open the Disk Utility included in the installer if you don't want to wait. Personally, as an audio engineer, I won't be able to update to Lion for some time now as Logic, Pro Tools and many plugins won't be compatible and stable yet, and reclaiming the space used by the beta partition is probably wise.

July 19 2011 at 4:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Josh The Geek

You could try wiping the partition first.

July 18 2011 at 11:24 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Michael M.

I have a similar problem with a secondary Linux partition. OSX 10.6.8 tells me I cannot modify it. The minus sign is available and when clicked goes through the motions of removing it but it's still there when its done. Ideas?

July 18 2011 at 11:22 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chad Johnston

This works in theory. Snow Leopard wouldn't let me remove the Lion partition because the partition I was removing had a higher OS version than the OS I was using to remove it. (That sentence is horrible.)

July 18 2011 at 11:15 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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