how big should the partition be for el capitan osx

All the space will be allocated to the main disk and it will have become a single partition.ġ3/ Click on 'Apply' in the bottom right corner of the window. Choose the language you want to use, then click the arrow which will take you to the 'MacOS Utilities' window.ġ0/ Choose 'Disk Utility' rather than 'Install MacOS' and click 'Continue'.ġ1/ Click on 'Partition', you'll see the the 42GB section (which you cannot adjust) and the extra space labeled 'Free space' that you added in step 4 above.ġ2/ Click on the 'Free space' section, then click on the minus button below it. Be patient, it will take time to create to create the new partition/container, especially if it is hundreds of GBs.ħ/ Quit VM Fusion (This step may not be necessary, but I did it to make sure everything was reset.)Ĩ/ Restart VM Fusion, then start the virtual machine you are making.ĩ/ You will probably see the language selection window again. Click Apply.ĥ/ Click on 'Advanced options' and choose 'Pre-allocate disk space'. Click on 'Hard Disk' in the 'Removable Devices' section (there may be two hard disks listed, choose the ~40GB).Ĥ/ Change the disk size to a size that matches (or is larger than) the size of the backup you want to install. In my case I used my Install OS X El Capitan.app that I had saved on an external hard disk.Ģ/ When the language selection window appears, shut down the virtual machine.ģ/ Go to Virtual Machine in the menubar and choose 'Settings'. How I resolved this turned out to be reasonably easy.ġ/ Go through the process of creating a new virtual disk using an installer for the operating system you want to use. What was needed was to find a way to combine the 40GB section with the additional free space into one continuous disk.

The reason this was happening was because VM Fusion was trying to copy the backup data to the 40GB partition/container, not the empty portion with the free space. I would get an error message saying there was not enough space. If you make the virtual machine disk size larger, that extra space is set into a separate partition/container.įor me, this meant that even after shutting down the virtual machine and increasing the disk size to 512 GB, I was still not able to migrate my backup to the virtual machine. It seems that when a virtual machine is made, the OS is kept in its own separate 40GB partition/container.

I was finally able to copy my bootable backup of El Capitan to a virtual machine, and it's now working fine!

How big should the partition be for el capitan osx