Alternatively: Resize Bootcamp Partition without Deleting Windows Although Disk Utility can help to create a new large Bootcamp partition, you have to delete Windows at first. And, if you turn to some programs like Camptune X, Winclone, iPartition and more to resize Bootcamp partition, you need to pay high fees.

Hi, In a recent post, I suggested that it would be good to have a writeup of the subject matter so that other folks could benefit from it. One of the site moderators suggested that since I had just gone through this process, that I would be the perfect one to add such a writeup. So, I am 'putting my money where my mouth is' and doing just that. In the post following post following this one, I detail how I was able to add a Bootcamp Windows 7 (and XP) partition as a VirtualBox Virtual Machine.

Site Moderators: Please review this document and and consider it for inclusion in the HowTos and Tutorials section. Thanks, JimBushWhack Posts: 77 Joined: 1. Sep 2008, 23:07 Location: SF Bay Area; California, USA Primary OS: Mac OS X other VBox Version: PUEL Guest OSses: Win XP on iMac; Win 7 on MacBook pro + bootcamp. How to Use a MacOS Bootcamp Partition as a VirtualBox Guest Virtual Machine Background: When I first got an Intel Mac in the summer of 2008, I decided that I could finally get rid of my Gateway PC running Windows ME. Since the Intel Mac allowed me to run Windows via Bootcamp, I was able to use this to run the Windows version of Quicken, since the Mac version of Quicken was not very good. This worked well for a few months until I got tired of having to reboot the Mac to run Windows via Bootcamp. I started looking at VMWare Fusion and Parallels as a solution.

Then I heard about VirtualBox. Since it was OpenSource (and free), I decided to give it a try.

But I was disappointed when I tried to setup my existing Bootcamp Windows partition as a VirtualBox Virtual Machine. It did not work and the instructions in the manual were fairly complicated and involved delving into the Mac CLI, as the VBox GUI did not (and still does not) allow you to perform this setup. There are many forum threads on this subject, many of which I have contributed to. Finally in the Spring of 2011, I was finally able to setup a Windows 7 Guest virtual machine from a Bootcamp partition on my MacBook Pro. I never could get a Windows XP Bootcamp based Guest running on my iMac and finally gave up on it. The Problem: About a month ago, I updated both of my Macs to run the new MacOS release Lion. When I got around to trying to bring up Windows 7 via VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro, it failed miserably.

The bootcamp partition had originally been setup as partition 3 on my hard disk under Snow Leopard. Upon investigation, I found that when Lion was installed, the hard disk partitioning had been shuffled and partition 3 was now the MacOS Recovery partition and the bootcamp partition had been moved to partition 4. Screen Shot 2012-03-24 at 1.38.51 PM.jpg (52.46 KiB) Viewed 32283 times Revisit Bootcamp Windows XP Virtual Machine: Since I got my Bootcamp Windows 7 Virtual Machine running with VirtualBox, I decided to give Windows XP another shot.

So, I installed VirtualBox 4.1.6 on my iMac. I then displayed the partition table and generated the vmdk description and MBR files. After this, I set open access for these files and then I used hexdump to display the contents of the partition table in the generated MBR file: ------------------------ JBs-iMac:BCXP Jim$ sudo vboxmanage internalcommands listpartitions -rawdisk /dev/disk0 Number Type StartCHS EndCHS Size (MiB) Start (Sect) 1 0xee 1023/2/254/63 200 1 2 0xaf 1023/2/228 409640 3 0xab 1023/2/254/63 600 4 0x0c 1023/2/27 424034344 JBs-iMac:BCXP Jim$ sudo vboxmanage internalcommands createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0 -filename BCXP.vmdk -partitions 4 RAW host disk access VMDK file BCXP.vmdk created successfully. Windows xp for mac os x.