Tonight's been a bit of a rough night. I have some programs that I use that run in Windows only, so when I got my macbook pro I installed Windows 7 via bootcamp. However, I realized I needed more hard drive space in my bootcamp partition, so I decided to reinstall windows. So...backup my bootcamp partition, delete windows and bomb my bootcamp partition, reinstall windows with a bigger partition, restore from my backup, right? Wrong...when I tried to delete my bootcamp partition, I got a message saying that bootcamp could not merge my partitions back into one partition. I tried going into the disk utility and manually adjusting the partitions, to no avail. The space formerly known as the bootcamp space just shows up as 60 GB of "free space" that I cannot combine with my Mac HD partition. Since I'm using a 256 GB SSD, I'd kind of like that space back. How can I repartition my disk to get this space back? If I do a fresh install of Mountain Lion, do I have the option to completely reformat and repartition the disk (like with Windows)? I have system images of both my mac and windows partitions from earlier tonight, so bombing the entire hard drive and starting from scratch isn't a problem.
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Bootcamp did not repartition hard drive correctly
- Thread starter phonyreal98
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Did you try verifying and repairing the disk? If not, try that and then try merging the partitions again. Reinstalling OS X would allow you a chance to blow away the entire drive, allowing you to create a new partition.
Yeah, I'm going to try that. Can I use Time Machine to restore everything afterwards (minus the effects of the unsuccessful repartitioning)? I have it set to automatically backup every few hours, so it would be mighty convenient if I could just restore to the backup point I made last night.
Yes, actually you can restore directly from a Time Machine backup. That is one of the options on the restore menu.
Hmmmmm....tried a clean install of Mac OS X....didn't work, still only have access to 190 GB on my hard drive instead of ~250 GB. When I go into the disk utility and verify the disk, it doesn't say anything is wrong. I've tried hitting repair disk anyway, and I get a message saying that "Macintosh HD could not be unmounted."
When I go to the partition screen in the disk utility, it shows that I have ~60GB formatted as free space. When I try to repartition this as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), nothing happens...I look in the log and the last thing I see is "Preparing to partition disk: "APPLE SSD SM256E Media.", but I don't see any evidence that the disk was actually partitioned. I assume the partitioning should only take a few minutes...but when I try to close the disk utility after attempting this (after much longer than it should take to partition the disk), I get the message "There are unsaved changes to the partition settings of this disk. Closing the window will lose your changes"
When I go to the partition screen in the disk utility, it shows that I have ~60GB formatted as free space. When I try to repartition this as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), nothing happens...I look in the log and the last thing I see is "Preparing to partition disk: "APPLE SSD SM256E Media.", but I don't see any evidence that the disk was actually partitioned. I assume the partitioning should only take a few minutes...but when I try to close the disk utility after attempting this (after much longer than it should take to partition the disk), I get the message "There are unsaved changes to the partition settings of this disk. Closing the window will lose your changes"
I had a similar problem when I was prepping my old MBA to gift to my brother. I did a clean install and needed to repartition the drive using the recovery disk utility. It took several tries to get rid of the bootcamp partition. Don't know why, and I don't remember the sequence of events, but I remember erasing both partitions and attempting the repartition several times. This was all from the recovery screen, so I had already lost my ability to boot back into OS X or Windows. Freaked me out a bit.