Snow Leopard on Acer Aspire One: Part 1: Preparing your System for Dual Boot

Friday, July 29, 2011

My recommendation is to make a dual boot. This way, if Mac OS X ever decides to roll back its functionality that you can still use Windows peacefully.

If you don’t want a dual boot and want Mac OS X only, then you can skip this step.

Most Netbooks come with Windows XP pre-installed by default. Some may already have Windows 7 Starter. Whether you decide to dual boot with XP or Windows 7, the procedure is the same.

First you are going to shrink the Windows partition. If you are using Windows 7, simply type partition in the start menu and you will be taken to Disk Management. If you are running Windows XP, you will need to download a partition manager. A good, free one, is EASEUS Partition Manager – download link will be found at the end of the article.

Once you have chosen your appropriate partition, you shrink the Windows partition to make a second partition which will likely be unallocated space. Then, you format the new partition that you created and you will be set to go.

The method is the same using both programs, but the approach is somewhat different. In Windows 7’s partition manager, you right click on the partition and choose Shrink Volume.

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Then you type the size that you want the new partition to be and it will appear as unallocated space next to the main hard drive where you right click and create a New Simple Volume and format it as NTFS.

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In EASEUS, use the slider and the onscreen instructions.

Once complete, mark the new Mac partition as active by right clicking and choosing active in Disk Manager to prevent the Mac installer from overwriting the Windows boot manager in case all goes south.

Download EASEUS Partition Manager for Windows XP

EASEUS Partition Manager 8.0.1

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Snow Leopard on Acer Aspire One Series

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4 Blogger:

iom said...

hi, my hard drive is split into two colours, one dark ble for the primary partition which is in 3 parts ( recovery partition 13gb, primary partion D: drive (preinstalled android os about 4gb) and system-active about 100mb .

The other colour is light blue with lots of space C: and its says Boot, page file, crash dump - Logical drive) 383 GB.

theres no way to shrink the deep blue ones. how do i proceed

iom said...

theres also no way to make it active because its not a primary partition

Julian said...

@iomYou will have 2 options. You can get Easus Partition Manager and when you create the new partition you can toggle logical and primary and do it that way, or use DiskPart. For simplicity, use Easus.

To use Diskpart, type Diskpart in the search or run CMD and type diskpart and hit enter.

In there, you will give the command:

list disk

Then it will give you a table. In my case, there is only 1 hard drive labelled Disk 0 so I then type:

select disk 0

It will tell me that it is selected. Then I need to make a new partition primary - before doing that, delete the Logical partition in Disk Manager, simple right click.

Then type:

create partition primary

It will then find the free space, and will tell you what it wants.

Once that is done, you can go to disk manager and format that partition as NTFS or Fat 32.

You will then type:

list partition

Select the new primary partition that has the size that you assigned using: (where x is the partition #)

select disk x

Then type:

active

Then you can close Diskpart

Hope that helps.

Julian said...

To shrink it, well, in that case, all around, use Easus if Disk Management gives you issues. With 383GB, unless you supercharged it with stuff, there is plenty of space to shrink and there's a slider in Easus.

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