UPDATE: Beta 3 is now available.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of a beta for the next update to iPartition. This beta version is available to all existing owners of iPartition. It can be downloaded here. If you’re not already logged in, you’ll be asked the username and password that you use for our site.

So what’s new?

As owners of iPartition will know, you cannot manipulate the disk that you have booted from which has meant that, to repartition your main start-up drive, you need to either boot from an external drive, or create a bootable DVD. To help with creating a bootable DVD, we have a feature in iPartition that allows you to create a bootable DVD, either from a template that you download from our site, or from the DVD installation media that came with your machine. Unfortunately, newer machines no longer come with DVD installation media and the latest downloadable template that we have (which is supplied by Apple), will not boot newer machines. We have asked Apple for updated templates but we don’t have them yet.

With Lion, Apple introduced Lion Recovery. This works by having a separate partition on your hard drive that includes a base system allowing you to reinstall Lion over the Internet. Internet Recovery is a related feature but is supported within the firmware of the machine (and therefore is only present on the latest machines).

In this version of iPartition, we’ve added support for creating a duplicate of your Lion recovery partition containing our applications. Obviously, to use this new feature you will need to be running Lion and you will need to have a recovery partition present (which should usually be the case, but we have heard of cases where the recovery partition is missing).

You will also need an external drive or USB flash drive to install the partition on (since the restriction of not being able to manipulate the disk you booted from still applies). The partition takes up a little over 650 MB (at time of writing), so you don’t need a very big drive. Cheap USB flash drives are readily available.

The duplicate recovery partition should operate in exactly the same way as your existing Lion Recovery partition (i.e. you can reinstall Lion and run other utilities) but you will also have the option of running iPartition. We’ll soon be adding support for iDefrag too.

If the external drive already has data on it, the data should be preserved (iPartition will shrink existing partitions to make room) so long as it uses the correct partition scheme (GUID). It will warn you if that’s not the case and you can, of course, use iPartition to change the partition scheme non-destructively.

After creating the recovery partition, you can boot from it by holding down the Option (⌥) key when you power on your machine.

We are particularly interested in hearing from customers who received their machines with Lion pre-installed. If that applies to you, please give this Beta version a try and let us know how you get on.

This version of iPartition also has a number of bug fixes and other minor improvements. Those of you who have reported issues with the current shipping version should find them all fixed with this release.

As always, please send feedback/queries to our support team.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iPartition version 3.3.2.

This update contains a number of bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iPartition 3 itself. You can find the release notes in the iPartition 3 Atom feed. (You will need an Atom enabled browser such as Safari to make sense of that page.)

As usual, if you have any problems, please contact our support team.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iPartition version 3.3.1.

This update contains a few bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iPartition itself. You can find the release notes in the iPartition 3 Atom feed.

Please contact our support ream if you have any problems with this new version.

We’ve got a new version of iPartition coming out soon and here’s a Beta version for you to try. Download it here (9 MB). (You might be prompted for the username and password that you use on our site.)

We’ve added basic cloning support: simply drag a partition to a disk, or to the free space on your current disk and it should queue an operation (or you can use the menu). The actual cloning operation should be pretty much as fast as the disks allow. Note that whilst it will clone Windows partitions happily, you’ll have to do a bit of work if you want to boot from them.

Anybody that reports a bug in the beta version, that we don’t know about, will get a free license for iDefrag¹.

Please send comments about this beta to our support team.

1. We’ll be reasonable about the free licenses, but we reserve the right to rescind the offer at any time, and we also reserve the right to determine what is or is not a bug. Basically, if you help us, we’ll give you the free stuff, but if hundreds all report the same bug, some will end up being disappointed. Our decision is final.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 3.2.0 of iPartition, which is mainly a bug fix release for users of iPartition 3.1.4, although we have added support for putting journals on external drives (this is only supported officially on Snow Leopard OS X Server).

For full release notes, see the iPartition news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iPartition menu and do the same for iDefrag Lite.

Alternatively, you can download directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

Please note: we have now dropped support for Panther (10.3) and PowerPC G3 machines so please do not try and upgrade if this applies to you.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 3.1.4 of iPartition, which is a bug fix release for users of iPartition 3.1.3.

For full release notes, see the iPartition news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iPartition menu and do the same for iDefrag Lite.

We have also released a new version of CDMaker which should be able to create templates from Snow Leopard installation DVDs. If you need it, select “Check for Updates…” in the menu.

Alternatively, you can download directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

UPDATE: We have now released an update to iPartition and iDefrag Lite. We are still working on the iDefrag update.

There are a few known minor issues with Snow Leopard:

1. Snow Leopard uses compression for some files. If these become fragmented and you use the Quick (on-line) algorithm to defragment them, they will become uncompressed. Until we release an update we advise you not to use the Quick (on-line) algorithm.
2. In the Info window, iDefrag will display zero for the size of compressed files and they will have no data fork. This is just a display issue.
3. Both iDefrag and iPartition will crash at launch time when running on a 64 bit kernel. By default, only the latest Xserve machines will be running the 64 bit Kernel so it should not affect many people. You can easily work around this by booting with the 32 bit kernel instead: hold down the 3 and the 2 keys as you power on the machine.

Please be aware that it’s perfectly fine to run iDefrag on a volume that has Snow Leopard installed whilst booted from a volume that has an earlier version of OS X, and that includes any bootable DVDs you might have made. The issues above still remain though i.e. you still shouldn’t run the on-line algorithm on a Snow Leopard volume until we’ve issued an update.

We will be releasing updates to iPartition and iDefrag soon that should address these issues. Please report any other issues to us via our support team.

We're pleased to announce the release of version 3.1.3 of iPartition, which is a bug fix release for users of iPartition 3.1.2.

For full release notes, see the iPartition news page. You'll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select "Check for Updates…" in the iPartition menu and do the same for iDefrag Lite.

Alternatively, you can download it directly from our site. If you choose this method, you'll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the "Reset Password" button on the log-in page.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

We're pleased to announce the release of version 3.1.2 of iPartition.

For full release notes, see the iPartition news page. You'll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select "Check for Updates…" in the iPartition menu and do the same for iDefrag Lite.

Alternatively, you can download it directly from our site. If you choose this method, you'll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the "Reset Password" button on the log-in page.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 3.1.1 of iPartition.

This release comes with tentative French localisation. Please report any problems you find. We know that there are a couple of things that are still in English. Many thanks to Ronald Leroux for helping us with the translation.

It also comes with a few other bug fixes. For full release notes, see the iPartition news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iPartition menu and do the same for iDefrag Lite.

Alternatively, you can download it directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.