Partitioning Mac For Windows

Partition the Mac hard drive to make room for Windows by dragging the slider, a minimum partition of 64 GB is recommended for Windows 10 Click on “Install” to start the Boot Camp Windows installation process, this will reboot the Mac and launch the Windows 10 installer. As a partition magic alternative, Minitool Partition Wizard is the latest partition manager software which be used to manage partition on Windows 10/8/7/XP and Server 2003/2008/2012. Steps to Resize Mac Partition. If you want to know to resize Mac partitions using Mac Disk Utility, follow the steps below to learn to do it. Navigate through your menu and open Mac Disk Utility. When Mac Disk Utility opens, select the drive you want to resize. Then select Partition on the toolbar to resize the Volume of your choice using the Utility tool. A pie chart will open showing free space and space occupied by each Volume.

Mac computers, whether you have an iMac, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or another Mac device, all have a finite amount of space. How you use it depends how quickly, or not, that space fills up and whether you need to add more space — either internally (such as upgrading to an SSD), or connecting to one or more external hard drives.

One thing you may not know is that the Mac boot drive is already partitioned. In all fairly recent models, the boot drive contains a secret partition that includes the macOS Recovery System, some essential Mac first aid tools and an installer, should, for any reason, your macOS fail to install or reboot.

Before we go into how to partition a Mac hard drive or SSD, let’s consider the benefits, and what you would need to do before partitioning a hard drive.

Benefits of making a partition in a Mac hard drive

One of the main reasons for implementing a partition is to run more than one operating system, such as macOS on one and Windows on the other. Or you can run two versions of the same OS in both sides of the partition, all from a single disk. Each disk drive, with its own volume, is found and treat separately in the Finder.

Once you know how to partition a hard drive on Mac, or how to partition an external hard drive on Mac, you can format and manage them separately, effectively giving you two computers within one. Although, if you want to use the other volume to run an earlier version of your Mac — which you can, using Time Machine, the volume for that side has to be twice as large as the space it requires.

What to do before partitioning a hard drive

Before going ahead with a partition, it’s always useful to tidy your Mac up. Most users find they have way more clutter and junk than they think. Between old folders and documents, images and videos, apps taking up space, hundreds of email attachment downloads and local iOS backups, many people find they have at least 62GB of junk they simply don't need. We recommend downloading CleanMyMac X, a powerful Mac cleaner, ideal for decluttering your Mac before creating a partition.

Partition Mac For Windows

How to partition a hard drive or SSD on Mac

There are several ways this can be done.

1. Use Boot Camp

Boot Camp is especially useful if you want to run Windows on your Mac. With Boot Camp comes Boot Camp Assistant, a handy app for partitioning your hard drive space so that one disk drive can run and operate macOS, and the other, Windows.

Following the on-screen instructions of this Mac app, you can partition your hard drive or SSD space to ensure that Windows will run smoothly on your Mac, almost as if it was operating on a native Windows PC or other device.

However, for those who don't want to partition Mac for that purpose, you can use Disk Utility.

2. Use Disk Utility

Disk Utility is another Mac application that will repair and, as needed, partition disk drive spaces.

As a Mac partition manager, it is a useful app that sits within your Utilities folder, inside your Applications folder.

Before starting a Mac partition exercise, it’s worth fully backing-up the folder you want to copy using Carbon Copy Cloner. Another useful tool that gives you an instantly bootable copy of the drive you are going to partition, working on the assumption that if anything goes wrong during this process, you are going to lose everything that is on that hard drive. So with a backup, nothing can go wrong, and if it does, you can easily fix it.

Before partitioning:

Clone the drive.
Make sure the clone has worked and with your cloned drive you can boot this up from the startup menu.
Plug the clone in and go to System Preferences > Startup Disk.
Check the cloned drive works, and then you can partition without any worries.

Now you are ready to partition hard drive on Mac, starting with the following:

Press Command-Shift-U or go to Utilities in the Applications folder.
Double-click the Disk Utility application.
In Disk Utility, select your Mac’s internal drive (or an internal SSD).
You should see two options: First Aid or Partition.
Click Partition.
Click the ‘+’ below Partition Layout.
Now a new Partition will appear, and you can change the size according to what you need.
Give this new drive a name.
If it hasn't worked exactly as you want, you can always click Revert to unpartition hard drive on Mac.
Or, once you are happy with the size, click Apply. You may also be asked to click a lock symbol in the bottom left-hand corner to confirm everything.

But don't worry if you want to make changes down the road. Everything you have done is reversible, so you can change the size or repartition hard drive on Mac.

Once the partition is done (which doesn't take as long as you might imagine) you will have a completely new hard drive or internal SSD, identical to your original, except without anything in it. Upload anything you need, or use the cloned version to store everything that was in the original hard drive - which still exists - in this partitioned version.