Merging 2 Partitions on a Leopard Drive...?

fab5freddy said:

no answers yet ?

i guess the OS X geniuses are out in the sun right now......?

Click to expand...

i'm not sure if u have to reinstall everything

but i knwo you can merge the 2 disks together using disk utility

come to think of it if your second drive is empty then u won't have to reinstal things back

To restore back to a single partition you will need to BACKUP FIRST! then boot from the OS X installation DVD and go into disk utility. Highlight the hard drive (not the partition) and click on the partition tab. Highlight the partition you want to remove and click on the - (minus) button. It should warn you that the second partition will be removed and the first will remain intact (if it does not warn you then do NOT proceed). Now drag the bottom right hand corner of the first partition until it takes up all of the remaining space and click apply.

you don't need to boot up(correct me if i am wrong)

you can just run disk utility and then do the rest what you said

Qwest905 said:

you don't need to boot up(correct me if i am wrong)

you can just run disk utility and then do the rest what you said

Click to expand...

A far as I know, you will not be able to change the partition table on a disk that you have booted from, that is why you need to either boot from the Install DVD or from a completely different disk.

i just tried it myself without actually doing it

this is what i get

this is without even using the install disk..just using disk utility



so seems like u don't have to backup everything..and start off with the installation disk to do this

I'm pretty sure you just can't boot up on the specific partition, but you may on the other. Just speculation, not 100% sure.

Qwest905 said:

i just tried it myself without actually doing it

this is what i get

this is without even using the install disk..just using disk utility

so seems like u don't have to backup everything..and start off with the installation disk to do this

Click to expand...

Ok. I stand corrected, this type of partition modification does not require you to boot from the Install DVD. I just tried this on an external hard drive that I had laying around with identical partitions as you have and it worked fine.

That message you are getting is correct. It is stating that your 'Second Drive' partition will be removed (you stated it was empty so thats ok) while the 'Main Drive' will remain intact. Once this is done you can then resize the main partition and click Apply.

I would always recommend that you backup the 'Main Drive'. Again, its entirely up to you.

While disk utility will allow you to modify the partition map of a drive you have booted from, it is not recommended.

I would suggest that you boot from the Leopard DVD and definitely back up all of your data before performing any partition modification. One slight cock-up and all of your data could become unreadable - is it really worth it to save 5 minutes?

LouisBlack said:

While disk utility will allow you to modify the partition map of a drive you have booted from, it is not recommended.

I would suggest that you boot from the Leopard DVD and definitely back up all of your data before performing any partition modification. One slight cock-up and all of your data could become unreadable - is it really worth it to save 5 minutes?

Click to expand...

Hear hear....

glad it worked out for you that way

but like everyone said it's always good to have a back up...just for the "just in case" type of situations

having problems here:
i had an 80 GB drive with 2 partitions
9: Apple_HFS Tiger 1 37.4 Gi disk0s10
10 Apple_HFS Leopard 37.0 Gi disk0s11

I blew away the Tiger Partition and reformatted as Extended Journaled (same as the leopard partition) and later decided i wanted just a single volume instead of the two partitions.
I’ve tried multiple options
1. disk utility: won’t increase to a larger size since leopard is on the second and not the first partition — see the disk list above

2. diskutil mergePartitions “Journaled HFS+” New disk0s10 disk0s11 Merging partitions into a new partition Start partition: disk0s10 Untitled 1 Finish partition: disk0s11 Leopard Cannot resize volume with a wrapper: /Volumes/Untitled 1 Merging partitions encountered error Invalid request (-9998) on disk disk0s10 Untitled 1. The erase will not occur.

3. repartitioned and reformatted the former tiger partition as jounaled extended.
4. tried the resize function again and got this: diskutil resizeVolume disk0s11 75G Started resizing on disk disk0s11 Leopard Verifying [ \ 0%…………………………………………… ] Resizing encountered error on disk disk0s11 Leopard: Unrecognized filesystem (-9958)


both partitions are the same filesystem so i’m confused as to why that error would show. If there's a way to rearrange the partitions so that the Leopard Partition is #1 I'm open to suggestions. Any other help anyone can provide would be helpful. I'm trying to avoid having to reinstall everything.


thanks in advance for the help.

To sozekizer-

I believe the partition to be saved/used after ANY repartitioning/resizing needs to the the first partition on the disk.

Normally I would say that the answer lies in just using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to clone your Leopard partition contents to the first partition, but I also do not think that the OS will offer you the chance to boot to a particular partition if they are both the same version of the OS. In that case, the Leopard partition needs to be cloned to another drive, be that internal or external and the machine rebooted to that. Then you can simply erase the first drive/ repartition to a single partition and then clone the information back onto it- then boot from it as if nothing had happened.