The key here is automatically resize the partition, and to do it non-destructively (i.e.: no repartitioning the drive in order to resize - and no launching an app and having someone do X, Y, and Z).
Here's the scenario - We have 3 generations, if you will of mac images here: an image that sized boot partitions at 40GB, an image that sized at 60GB, and the current one that sizes at 100GB. I would like to detect the size of the boot partition, user data partition, and free space, and determine if there is enough space to resize to 100GB on the boot partition. I can do this easily enough using diskutil and repartitioning the drive, but I want to do this non-destructively, because we have nowhere to store that much user data while we repartition, and we don't have the time to copy that much data off the drive anyway.
Currently we use iPartition as a singular, manual resolution for the occasional Mac that we find that has run out of drive space, but this is time consuming and requires me to send a tech out to do the work. My imaging workflow does not repartition disks when reimaging in the case that we want to preserve user data, however when that is not the case the workflow resizes the boot partition to 100GB and user data partition to 0b (effectively using the rest of the space), so upon (re)provisioning a Mac, the 100GB partition problem is solved.
I reached out to Coriolis Systems and currently they do not have a way to automate iPartition, except maybe using services and automator, but that's not a supported solution and they have no notes on how to get something like that set up, so I was wondering if anyone has run into this issue and resolved it, and how? We're mostly concerned because we'll be rolling CS6 out here in about 6 months and about a third to half our macs will fail the available drive space test for the roll-out.
