When I installed Leopard, being a geek, I chose the most complicated FS I had to choose from, the Mac OS Journaled, Case-Sensitive FS. While this seemed like a cool idea at the time, I quickly learned that this is not a preferred option and you should only use it if you have a reason why you need it. Why that would be… no clue. Perhaps it’s that you don’t want Photoshop to work, or that you vehemently despise the THQ children’s game series like Cars or The Incredibles.
On Thursday evening I took it apon myself to go back to a non case sensitive FS. Here is how I did it without destroying all my data.
Things you will need:
• Clean up your HD so that you have about 55%-60% free space. You can also use an external drive but I am not going to cover that route as I did not have one.
• Ubuntu Live CD (I used v.8.10 but any version will probably work)
• Mac OS X CD/DVD (I am using OS 10.5)
• Boot Camp or DiskUtility.
• Carbon Copy Cloner
• Something to do while data is moving. I recommend Mortal Kombat vs. DC or Call of Duty 4, or Call of Duty: World At War
** DISCLAIMER: This worked for me, hopefully it will for you. Back up your data before doing this. We’ll be moving and resizing partitions, that goes south… you’re screwed. **
Preparation:
Boot with the OS X disk (put it in the drive, hold down C when the screen turns gray), go into Disc Utility (at the top) and run a verify / repair on the physical disk that you need to modify. Reboot.
Creating a usable partition:
First thing to do is create a non case sensitive partition. Open up Disk Utility (DU), click on the PHYSICAL DISK you want to modify. You will know you have clicked a physical disk because you will get the “Partition” option on the right.
Click the partition button. Now you see all of your partitions. The blue part is your data, the white is empty space. Grab the corner of the partition and drag it up until the partition is a little UNDER 50% of the total drive capacity.
Apply and reboot when it’s finished. DU should finish within a couple of minutes, see note below.
NOTE: if you don’t reboot after every partition change DiskUtility will freeze while updating the partition table. I safely killed DU during that freeze many times, but it is a dangerous operation.
Once rebooted, open up DU again, select the physical drive and select the open space you created. Create a new partition under there, you will have to create a case-sensitive, but we’ll fix that in a minute.
Apply. No need to reboot yet.
Once the partition is created, click on the NEW PARTITION in DU, click on ERARE on the right, select the MAC OS Extended Journaled FS (NOT CASE SENSITIVE) then click on ERASE.
TADA! We have a new partition!
Cloning the Data:
Open up Carbon Copy Cloner, select the source drive as your original partition and the target as the new partition. In the Target box, you should see an indicator that this volume will be bootable. Hooray.
Clone it… now is a good time to go play those videogames! 40Gb of data took my machine about 1:20:00 to copy.
Data done copying …. Ok play more games…
Done now? GOOD!
Open up System Preference and select STARTUP DISK. Click on your NEW PARTITION and close System Preferences.
Open Finder , browse to your new partition go to the Users/[your profile name]/Desktop folder and create a new folder called “HEY IM NEW” or something. I used “WANG” but that’s me. We’re doing this so that we know instantly on reboot that we are booting from the correct volume.
Reboot.
Removing the old partition:
You may have seen a folder with a “?” (missing folder) flash on the screen before the Apple logo, and the system may be booting slowly, that’s ok, we will fix that later, nothing critical.
If you’re booting from the new partition and you see your new folder on your desktop then verify all your data exists on the new partition and blow the old case-sensitive crap away. Open DU, click on the PHYSICAL DISK, click on the ORIGINAL partition (probably at the top) and click the (-) button. GONE!. Apply and close DU.
Don’t start jumping for joy yet. Now it gets weird. For some reason DU and boot camp won’t let you resize a disk unless the free space comes AFTER the resizable partition… see our dilemma now?
Reclaiming your disk space:
Reboot with the Ubuntu CD (do the hold-down C thing again). In Ubuntu, at the top go to System > Administration > Partition Editor.
Click the Move/Resize button. Drag your partition to the beginning of the disk. Hit Apply… go play videogames for another… however long. Mine took another 1:20:00.
Ok, all is done. Notice you can’t resize the partition… sucks. Now we have to set up the drive so that OS X will let us resize the partition. Click on the unpartitioned space and create a new partition, close the LAST OPTION in the filesystem dropdown, which is UNFORMATTED. Apply.
Reboot with the OS X DVD. Once In the OS X DVD, do the VERIFY/REPAIR again on the PHYSICAL DISK. Reboot.
Still getting that weird “?” folder.. no problem, promise we’ll fix it.
Ok back in OS X. I used Boot Camp for this but DU will work too. I RECOMMED USING BOOT CAMP ASSISTANT.
Boot Camp: open Boot Camp Assistant from the Application > Utilities folder. Once you’re in hit continue, you will need to select the option to add/remove Windows partitions. Your next option will be to remove the “Windows “ partition (haha. .we tricked it). Apply the change. TADA!
Disk Utility: You can open DU, click on the physical drive, select your good partition, and drag it to use the full drive.
From the command line you can use “diskutil list” to show your partitions, then use “diskutil resizeVolume [your good partition] 96G “(or however big the drive is).
Fixing the “?” on bootup, the missing folder… whatever it is:
Finally… fixing the stupid “?” folder and slow bootup. Open System Preferences and go into Startup Disk. Click on ANY OTHER VOLUME, close Startup Disk, reopen Startup Disk and select your new, awesome, non-case sensitive volume. Reboot. Tada.
Hope you found the success I did.. my kid can now play Cars and we all know.. when the 3 year old is happy… everyone is happy.
I would like to thank David, Apple, Ubuntu, and the many other who wrote articles on parts of this.
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