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I'm trying to make a spot for Ubuntu on my external drive from which I boot my mac. Right now, the drive has only one partition, an hfs+ partition that stores Mac OS X.

I'm using gparted to modify the drive from another computer running linux. However, GParted stalls forever on the "shrinking" step at the substep "shrinking partition (using libparted)"

I've tried doing the same think - modifying the drive using Disk Utility from a computer running Mac OS X - and disk utility fails reporting "no space left on device."

What could be the problem here? I don't yet have 10 reputation on here like I do on Stack Overflow, so I can't post a screenshot of the problem.

Thanks in advance for any replies!

-Chase

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You should be doing this through Boot Camp. Mac OS X has it's own boot manager that you should not mess with.

How much free space do you have on your laptop? If you really are running out of space, then it won't let you shrink it.

If you routinely edit/delete/create large files, there's a chance that your disk could be fragmented. Here's an eHow article about how to defrag (you'll need a 3rd party program):

http://www.ehow.com/how_2091895_defrag-mac-hard-drive.html

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Just to second the recomendation to defragment. I had exactly the same problem and only managed to resolve it by first defragmenting the HFS+ partition using Drive Genius 3. Once done, Disk Utility was then happy to resize the partition. – Asinine Monkey Apr 3 '11 at 20:31
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