How to fix "Error: -5341: MediaKit reports partition (map) too small" after upgrading to a larger hard disk?
I recently bought a new SSD drive, as my stored data amounts outgrew the old one a little bit. After copying all data using dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/disk1, I want to enlarge my system partition, but Disk Utility is failing silently and diskutil resizeVolume /dev/disk0s2 R (first partition is the EFI boot volume), I receive following error message:
Error: -5341: MediaKit reports partition (map) too small
How can I resize my system volume?
Your partition table does not know about the larger hard drive yet. While Disk Utility also queries the hard disk size and lets you request it to enlarge your partition, it will fail when finally changing the partition size (after doing a file system check).
This can be solved on different ways:
One is to destroy the GPT (partition table) and recreate it manually, which is a rather annoying and error-prone way of fixing the problem as it's easy to mess up when adding your partitions again.
An easier, better way is to run gparted, which is also included in current Ubuntu Desktop Live images (or is easy to install from their packages repositories) and probably lots of other Linux disks. After starting it, it will recognize the wrong disk size in your partition table and ask whether it should fix it for you. After fixing the table, reboot to OS X and finally enlarge the Volume.
I erased the drive and selected the scheme as GUID partition, tried setting up the partitions I wanted, hit apply and it worked. Then I erased the drive again, selected Apply Partition map (which was previously giving the "Mediakit / space too small" error), tried setting up my partitions, hit apply and... drum-roll. It worked that time!? Hope that helps someone else too.