2 partitions & "invisible" Free Space

[GramyUSiebie]

Hello forum users,

I have a problem that looks like this:

I had devided my Toshiba drive into 2 partitions: Macintosh HD (HDD1) and Macintosh HD2 (HDD2) about 160 GB each.
Had El Capitano on HDD1 - about 24 GB available
and only pictures, videos, files on HDD2 - 40 GB available

Sierra came out, I downloaded, not enough space on HDD1, so I installed on HDD2.
However not a sing app installed on HDD1 under El Capitano, would run under Sierra (hdd2) now.

So I erased the entire HDD2 - by Disk Utility and Terminal.


I hoped, drives would merge into one with a total of 320GB - which of course not happened.

This is the outcome of my operations:

Macintosh HD (HDD1) 159 GB - of which 24 free
Free Space 160 GB - completely invisible space

Any ideas how to recover the missing 160 GB and merge it with to HDD1?

 

[JohnDS]

Click on Toshiba in Disk Utility, then on Partition. You should be able to resize the partition to the full size of the disk.

 

[Weaselboy]

You need to go into the partition tab there are resize Macintosh HD to fill the free space. Thing is you cannot do that right now because that volume has been converted by the OS install into a core storage volume.

Run the command below to run off core storage, then you should be able to resize the volume normally.

diskutil cs revert /

Backup first then also disconnect any external drives before you do this.

 

[GramyUSiebie]

You need to go into the partition tab there are resize Macintosh HD to fill the free space. Thing is you cannot do that right now because that volume has been converted by the OS install into a core storage volume.

Run the command below to run off core storage, then you should be able to resize the volume normally.

diskutil cs revert /

Backup first then also disconnect any external drives before you do this.

--------

I cannot resize any partition and CS revert says there is no CS.


I am not sure what I did, however, here is the outcome:

 

[Weaselboy]

Okay it looks like the revert command worked, because the core storage volume is gone. I had not noticed earlier, but your recovery partition (disk0s3) is using 160GB and that is why you cannot reclaim that space. I have no idea how you managed to do that.

Do you have everything backed up to a Time Machine external drive? There are Terminal commands we could use to get rid of that 160GB recovery partition, but I'm concerned about that error message in your last screen shot. Let's just erase the whole disk and start over. Do a command-option-r boot to recovery then from there use Disk Utility to erase the whole drive. Do that by going to the erase tab then selecting the Toshiba drive at the very top of the left column then erase the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Then quit Disk Util and reinstall the OS, then after that restore from Time Machine.

Were you previously having some sort of disk issues before you started all this?