I have an external drive that has several partitions. I want to reformat the drive so that it has only one partition. The first partition cannot be removed. The next partition cannot be removed because "the previous volume cannot be resized". And the third partition is listed as "Free space" with a format of "free space". Trying to remove it fails. Is there a way just to reformat the drive without going through this mess of trying to repartition?
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Cannot delete partitions on external USB drive
- Thread starter FredT2
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Brian has it right in reply 2 above.
Fishrrman's "guaranteed!" way to repartition a drive (or remove existing partitions):
1. BACK UP any data on the drive to somewhere else
2. ERASE the entire drive using Disk Utility to Mac OS extended, journaling enabled GUID partition format
3. RE-partition if necessary (you don't need to do this step)
4. RESTORE the data to the drive from your backup.
Guaranteed!
Fishrrman's "guaranteed!" way to repartition a drive (or remove existing partitions):
1. BACK UP any data on the drive to somewhere else
2. ERASE the entire drive using Disk Utility to Mac OS extended, journaling enabled GUID partition format
3. RE-partition if necessary (you don't need to do this step)
4. RESTORE the data to the drive from your backup.
Guaranteed!
Select the drive itself like in my screenshot and not the partitions below it, then click the erase button and format the entire disk to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). That will set it to one, large partition.
You also may need to click that View button there and select Show all Devices so you can see the disk and not just the partitions.
Thanks. I had View set to "Show only Volumes" and so was not seeing the drive itself. I haven't used Disk Utility in a while and had never seen that view. Easy after that.