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.

The bug was introduced in version 2.1.0 when support for quick termination was added. Quick termination means that when you quit an application it will quit much more quickly (but only when the application isn’t doing something). Regrettably, it broke our auto-update feature.

If you want to update to version 2.1.1, you can download the update directly from our website. If version 2.1.0 is working well for you, there is no need to upgrade to version 2.1.1 since the changes are relatively minor (see release notes).

Sadly, when we release version 2.1.2, the same problem will exist and upgrading to that version will also have to be done manually (if you’re running version 2.1.0 and 2.1.1).

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused our customers.

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.

Today is a sad day, for we have lost a great man.

Here's to Steve.

This update contains full support for Lion and some other minor bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iDefrag 2 itself. You can find the release notes in the iDefrag 2 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.

As a result, effective immediately, we have instructed our machines (including our servers) not to trust the DigitNotar root certificate. This should not have an impact on customers unless you are (or your mail server admin is) using DomainKeys (aka DKIM) to certify outbound e-mail and the certificate you are using was issued by DigiNotar; in that specific case, there is a slightly increased risk that your e-mail will land in our junk filter. The fix, should you be in this situation, is to use a certificate issued by someone other than DigiNotar.

Microsoft has already removed the DigiNotar root certificate from its list of trusted certificates, and Mozilla has indicated that the same will happen with Firefox. Users of Safari (and indeed Mac OS X in general) may wish to take the following steps to disable trust of the DigiNotar root CA:

1. Start Keychain Access (you can do this from the Spotlight menu by entering “Keychain Access” in the search field, or by going to “/Applications/Utilities” in Finder).

2. Enter “digino” in the search field at the top right.

   

3. Double-click the “DigiNotar Root CA” certificate.

4. Open up the “Trust” settings.

5. Change the “When using this certificate:” setting to “Never Trust”.

   

6. Close the certificate window. You’ll be prompted for an admin username and password.

7. Ensure that the DigiNotar Root CA now looks like this in Keychain Access:

   

   In particular, check that it says “This certificate is marked as not trusted for all users”.

Update (14:35 BST)

Owing to an apparent deficiency in the way Safari behaves with respect to root certificate trust (about which I’ve already filed a bug report), it may be better to simply delete the DigiNotar Root CA certificate altogether, since this will result in a more obvious response from Safari when visiting a site that depends on it.

To do that instead, select the DigiNotar Root CA certificate in Keychain Access, and choose “Delete” from the “Edit” menu.

http://lists.apple.com/archives/Macos-x-server/2011/Aug/msg00195.html

https://discussions.apple.com/message/15933171#15933171

For more information, please see our product page and give the demonstration version a try.

• iDefrag’s “Reboot and defragment” mode does not function with Lion (yet… we are working on this). As a result, to run an off-line defragmentation algorithm you will need to boot from a different partition or disk, or from a bootable DVD, which you can create by choosing the “Create Boot Disk…” option from the “iDefrag” menu.

• iPartition will display the partition type for Core Storage partitions as 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC, which is the GUID (Globally Unique IDentifier) that Apple is using for Core Storage. This is expected behaviour, but we will be adding a name for this partition type in the next update.

• iPartition is not able to format or non-destructively resize Core Storage (i.e. Lion FileVault) partitions. As far as we are presently aware, there is no documentation for either the Core Storage volume format, or for the associated library that ships with Mac OS X, and it is therefore unlikely that we will be able to support Core Storage in iPartition any time soon.

We intend to release updates for both iDefrag and iPartition in due course to address some of these issues.

UPDATE: We have now released version 2.1.0 of iDefrag and version 3.3.2 of iPartition which have full Lion support.

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.

This update contains some new features (basic cloning support) and 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.

We have also released an updated version of iDefrag Lite which now contains some of the features available in iDefrag 2 along with a few bug fixes.

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

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.

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 iDefrag 2 itself. You can find the release notes in the iDefrag 2 Atom feed.

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 iDefrag 2 itself. You can find the release notes in the iDefrag 2 Atom feed.

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 iDefrag 2 itself. You can find the release notes in the iDefrag 2 Atom feed.