This was meant to be a post about how wonderful it’s been using Ubuntu 8.10 on my MacBook Pro for the last 2 days, but alas I haven’t even been able to attempt the install due to the Mac’s inability to resize it’s partition properly.
It’s a 120G drive, Mac HD presently filling the entire volume, but I’m only using 55G of data.
Using bootcamp, I drag the slider to repartition the drive, making the ‘Windows’ partition 40GB, and after a minute or so I get an error saying it was unable to move some files, and I should back my stuff up and freshly format the partition.
Using disk-utility, I drag the slider to resize the Macintosh HD partition, and after a minute or so it says there was ‘insufficient space’.
Le Sigh
November 17, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Sounds like you have a filesystem that’s dispersed across the entire disk…
And since Mac OS doesn’t appear to provide a defragmenter, a reformat indeed looks like the best bet.
–
As an aside, I’ll be attempting to install Debian next week onto my Blackbook — hopefully I don’t have the same issues!
November 18, 2008 at 9:50 am
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
November 18, 2008 at 5:10 pm
By default, whenever you open a file < 20MB it will relocate the file to a free contiguous block, so the file system is constantly being defragmented. There’s also a ‘hot space’, where the 5000 most frequently used files 20MB.