experience with camptune to resize partitions

Important !

You can, with Camp Tune, increase your Boot Camp partition size and down-size your Mac partition, as long as you remember to re-format your Windows in NTFS.

HOW (to format your Windows partition from FAT32 to NTFS) : It's a simple command line in Windows, though it requires a bit of patience, including an automatic reboot or two to complete the process. In Windows, run the command "convert c: /fs:ntfs" without the quotation marks and change c to another drive if needed..

I am doing that myself : it went fine (i.e. Camp Tune), but I am restarting the process as my Windows was in FAT32 prior to running Camp Tune.

Remember to make a back-up of your Mac (Time Machine) and of your Windows partition (Camp Tune).

Cheers

Going from FAT to NTFS is not just "resizing" though.

Also, I'd be on egg shells with Lion and Recovery partition present; or if using FileVault2.

We have been recommending CampTune, for the last year at least....

My message explains that you MUST be in NTFS format prior to trying to inscrease your partition beyond the default 32 GB.

I am informed (I hope it is true), that with Mac OS 10.6 and beyond, Boot Camp now allows to create bigger partitions in NTFS. With Mac OS 10.4 and 10.5, Boot Camp only creates a 32 GB FAT32 partition, hence the need for CampTune.

Thank you.

EDIT - Important :

To feel socially responsible, I must warn that using CampTune on an existing Windows installation, that you converted from FAT32 to NTFS, is a very messy and painful process, as file permissions get screwed around. I just spent about two days running disk repairs (the CHKDSK tool, which can take over 5 hours!), fixing my user profile in safe-mode boot, fixing permissions, and so on. Therefore, I really recommend to anyone to just install a fresh Windows with CampTune (if you are using Mac OS 10.4 or 10.5) or with the new BootCamp system by upgrading to Mac OS 10.6 (only cost 30$ surprisingly [I am told, in MacOS 10.6, BootCamp can now create partitions in NTFS larger than 32GB. I have not seen it for myself.]).

nb: Moreover, if with CampTune you try restoring a Windows back-up on a new partition, you can have very bad surprises... (as above or worse) I was hoping CampTune would avoid these pits and traps, but it does not.

Good post. I'm considering Camptune for Windows 8 on my rMBP in case I run out of space.

I've used CampTuneX and IMHO is disappointing. It took 4 tries before my BC partition would resize. After resize it is very slow and buggy in both Parallels and native boot Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. I'm considering blowing out BC partition and starting over with a clean install. CampTune support wasn't very helpful.

Since the original post is from 2011, I though I would offer the experience I had recently with Camptune.

CONTEXT: Yesterday, I bought a new MacBook Pro (Retina, 13"). I used Bootcamp to create a partition (formatted NTFS - that was the only choice) and installed Windows 7 professional. All good.

When I made the bootcamp partition I split my drive 50/50 (i.e. 250GB for the Mac and Windows/Bootcamp partitions). Within hours I had second thoughts because I will use this machine primarily as a Windows machine. I felt I had made a mistake to not make my Bootcamp partition larger.

Because I had just bought the computer (and had only invested a day of my time) I figured that I would bit the bullet and go throught the process of killing my Bootcamp partition, recreating it, reinstalling Windows, etc. before going futher down the path of getting my machine "all set up" and ready to use.

I did some searching online before beginning the process and I'm so glad I did. I just installed CampTune X (through a digital download), installed the product, and changed my partition size. The whole process (front to back) took about 15 minutes.

I realize that I might be a slightly different situtation than most with a new/clean machine already formatted to NTFS. I have seen others have problems due to FAT partitions and matching versions of Mac OS with a compatible version of Camptune. But I have to say that my experience was flawless and the $19.99 was TOTALLY worth it.

I will second mrspez. Bought a MBP 15" retina recently and bootcamped a win7 64 bit into a 60 gb partition. When finished, it was tight with only 10 gb free space. I need the win partition to run some scientific equipment and 10gb would be about 2 weeks of data.

I turned off FileVault (30 min to decrypt) time machine backed up my Maverics partition (~45 minutes on gigabit Ethernet to my NAS) backed up windows with backup assistant (about 1/2 hr on same Ethernet to same NAS) then used camp tune to resize the partitions. That took about 15 minutes.

So all in all camp tune saved me about 2 hrs from having to re-wipe the partitions and restore from backups. $10 an hour for my time? Thats the new minimum wage. Worth it.

Thought I'd my experience because while this is an old thread, it still comes up pretty high on the google searches. I was in a similar situation that most people, I rarely use bootcamp; I'm mostly in OS X so I originally created a 60 Gigabyte partition, and I was often fighting for space in spite of only really using web browsers and MS office, so wanted to increase to 90Gig.

My setup: Early 2014 MBP Retina 15", OS X Yosemite, 512 SSD encrypted with file vault. bootcamp 5.1, with a VM installed as Windows 8.1 upgraded to 10 (It was the upgrade to win 10 that took my freespace down to zero). I was paranoid about loosing data, so I actually backed up 2 different ways first, and checked both filesystems (NTFS and OSX's) before starting, this ended up taking longer than camptjne.

With Camptune X (Version 10) the experience was shockingly easy, no need for a bootable CD or anything else, and you no longer need to decrypt via FileVault. The product was simple, just run it and move the slide, I found the hardest thing was to get through the activation process. I will however say that I dispute the claim that it changes your partitions in minutes, it's really more like a full hour (maybe a little more, I wasn't looking at the clock). When it starts the operation, for all intensive purposes it seemed that the computer was locked up; I could use other apps, mouse would respond, but nothing was clickable, and even the light went out on the battery. I didn't force restart because I was afraid of the state I was in and glad I waited it out, after an hour or so it was done. (FYI 45 minutes of the hour was on zero percent on the progress bar, so don't be alarmed if this happens to you).

For me it was well worth it.... I would have had to decrypt, resize OS X, then use some sort of other partition manager to resize windows (or worse, reinstall win 8.1, and upgrade again to 10, taking hours), then encrypt again with file vault, so the 20 bucks for Camptune probably saved me a day worth of effort. I also bought their NTFS driver at the same time which, while another 20 bucks, is already saving me a ton of time, since with it, I can read / write NTFS data from my mac, making it easier to move data to and from Bootcamp (before I'd use a USB Key).

Hi!

It seems that you guys know much about camp tune. In that cause I want to ask you guys how long it takes to check the windows Partition? For me it isn't finished after half an hour.
Is this normal?

Thanks!

PS.: I have an iMac late 2013 with an 2TB HDD.