Merging partitions in OSX 10.5.5 and moving User directory into a different Volume

Since I have been editing a lot of photos in Aperture and doing hibernation at mode 5, the startup disk has been easily filled up to the limit.

I decided to delete my Windows Partition and move completely to OSX Leopard because I can still run Vmware Fusion just in case I need it. I guess my PC gaming has ended and luckily I have a console to cover that.

I am also waiting for a 4gb kit ram for an upgrade to give this machine a boost of 8gb at 64 bit. I will be testing Photoshop scratch disk to run solely from the memory.

Now back to business.

First. Moving the users directory in a new partition

root# dscl localhost
cd /Local/Default/Users
change user dsAttrTypeNative:NFSHomeDirectory /Volumes/UserData /Volumes/Data/Users

Log-off

2nd. Merging Journaled HFS+ Partition

Since my 2 partition of a 74GB raptor is making the Startup Disk insufficient, I have to merge them.

Create a Journaled HFS+ on the second partition then on the Terminal

sudo su
mergePartitions "Journaled HFS+" Macintosh disk1s1 disk1s2
 
Merging partitions into a new partition
Start partition: disk1s1 Mac
Finish partition: disk1s2 disk1s2
Attempting resize
Changing filesystem size on disk 'disk1s1'...
Attempting to change filesystem size from 32346472448 to 74348273664 bytes
/dev/disk1
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *69.2 Gi    disk1
1:                  Apple_HFS Mac                     69.2 Gi    disk1s1

The last saving grace. Boot using the OSX Installer. Open Terminal.

diskutil list
fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
p
f 1
write
y
exit

Seeing it work…priceless

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