Camptune X, resize your Boot Camp partition quickly and easily
File systems are a more complicated issue than they may seem. Each of the existing or used proposals in the different operating systems has its pros and cons. In OS X, Mac OS Plus or HFS+, the file system allows you to resize partitions quickly and easily from the Disk Utility.
The problem is that all that is fine as long as you don’t have a Boot Camp partition created. If so, resizing a partition with Windows is not easy. What’s more, we have to delete it, recreate it, and then reinstall the system and all the apps. For those last steps we could resort to Winclone but just deleting and re-creating is already annoying. If you want or need to resize your Boot Camp partition with Windows the solution is called Camptune X.
Camptune X, here’s how it works
Camptune X, resize your Boot Camp partition
Camptune X is developed by Paragon Software , a company most people know for its solution to add read and write support to NTFS drives under OS X. Thanks to Camptune X we will be able to resize our Boot Camp partition in the same way we would do with an HFS+ formatted one. That is, without the need to delete anything, the application takes care of enlarging or reducing the size without losing data.
Its operation is very simple, once we run it, the Boot Camp partition is automatically detected. Next, a selector appears that will allow us to increase or reduce the size of the partition. The only thing we have to take into account is the free space available. Once established, we will continue and the process will start running.
If you use OS X The Captain should be aware that the system now introduces SIP (System Integrity Protection), a protection that prevents certain directories and files from being modified . This is an iOS-style measure that is intended to prevent problems, either from malicious applications or from the user’s own manipulation. Well, with SIP enabled Camptune X will not work. So either disable it or create a self-booting USB drive with the built-in utility.
If you decide to disable SIP, you can then re-enable it, just by using a simple Terminal command. First restart your Mac and boot from the recovery partition , you can do this by holding down the ALT key or Command + R. Once it starts open the Terminal and execute the command.
csrutile disable
We will then be prompted to restart for the changes to take effect. If we then want to activate again we’ll have to type the following command and restart again.
csrutil enable
If you don’t want to touch the terminal you can create a self-booting USB and run Camptune X from it. In any way, with this small utility you can distribute your Windows installation under Boot Camp if you need it, comfortably and avoiding loss of information re-installations, etc.
Finally, I recommend backing up OS X with Time Machine and Windows with Winclone. This way you will be even more secure.
