Can't resize main partition even in G-Parted

Question

So I had an old partition that I deleted, and now moved all my stuff to the new one. Now I am out of space, and I want to resize it to fill the whole hard drive.

But Disk Utility wouldn't let me resize the partition! It is grayed out.

So...

I boot off of G-Parted Partition Editor, and sure enough, I couldn't resize the partition! I could only make it a bit smaller to the few megabytes of remaining space.

What is wrong, and is there a way to fix this?

Answer 1

As already mentioned, the free space is before the start of your partition. You can't grow a partition from the start - you can only expand it from its end.

You can try something like this:

1. Create a partition in the free space
2. Use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of your current partition into the new one
3. Boot from the new partition
4. Make sure everything works fine from the new partition - try all your usual programs, and make sure it's exactly the same as it always was
5. Delete the old partition
6. Expand the new partition to fill the hard disk space completely (reusing the space that was used by the old partition)

There are a few other options as well as Carbon Copy Cloner, but it has worked well for me in the past, and will make the target partition bootable.

Answer 2

It's greyed out because the free space is before the partition.

Try resizing using iPartition. iPartition can move partitions without data loss, which can usually get you out of sticky situations such as this.

You can modify the boot disk by making a bootable CD/DVD or installing on an external OS X installation.