Deleted BootCamp partition can´t be merged with rest of HD

[Jochen K]

Hello,

I am currently running OS X 10.11.1 on a MacBook Pro Retina with a APPLE SSD SM0256F Media (256 GB SSD HD). I have recently tried to install Windows 10 via BooCamp. BootCamp ran fine, but installation of Windows failed (the reason of which I do not know). So I wanted to regain the space dedicated to the BootCamp partition -- again via BootCamp. This process, however, failed. The BootCamp partition was deleted, but the resulting space was not merged with the main part of the HD. So, I tried disk utility both from within OS X and from the recovery partition, which also gave me an error message (non-specific). I have had the HD checked for errors, but there were none.

Does anyone know what to do in such a situation?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Jochen

 

[george_k]

I had this problem yesterday. Here's what to do:

Open Disk Utility and choose the name of your drive (not a partition). Then click on "Partition". A pie chart will pop up. Choose the piece representing Bootcamp and hit the minus button on the bottom of the chart and you're done. The part will be completely removed and Disk Utility will ask you to merge it with Macintosh HD.

Hope this helped!

 

[Jochen K]

Hi George,

thanks for your answer. However, this is basically what I did. The BootCamp utility deleted the BC partition but failed to expand the OS X partition. So, there is no longer a BC partition. Disk utility, in turn, fails to reclaim the unused space (it even, at one time, gave me the opportunity to expand the existing partition to 300 GB (on a 256 GB HD)).

Jochen

 

[Floris]

maybe this helps:

 

[Weaselboy]

Hi George,

thanks for your answer. However, this is basically what I did. The BootCamp utility deleted the BC partition but failed to expand the OS X partition. So, there is no longer a BC partition. Disk utility, in turn, fails to reclaim the unused space (it even, at one time, gave me the opportunity to expand the existing partition to 300 GB (on a 256 GB HD)).

Jochen

Run each of the commands below in Terminal and tell me the output of each so I can see how your partitions are setup.

diskutil list

diskutil cs list

 

[Jochen K]

Here it is:

… and …

What I notice here is that the Recovery HD has a size of about 50 GB!

Jochen

 

[madeirabhoy]

this happened to me on el capitan beta, and the only solution was to wipe the whole hard drive and reinstall. i think its something wrong in el capitan.

 

[Partron22]

Why are people running such tiny HD's these days?

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

If nothing else works, try this:
1. Create a BOOTABLE CLONED BACKUP of your Mac OS partition onto an external drive usign either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper. I would recommend CCC because it will also create a clone of your recovery partition, as well.
2. Boot from the cloned backup
3. Open Disk Utility and re-initialize the internal drive (use 1 partition).
4. Again using CCC, "RE-clone" the contents of the back "back to" the internal drive. Again, if you cloned the recovery partition, it will get re-cloned back to the internal.

Takes a little time, but almost certainly guaranteed to work.

 

[Weaselboy]

Here it is:

What I notice here is that the Recovery HD has a size of about 50 GB!

The issue there is that the El Capitan install converted your drive into a core storage volume that cannot be resized by Disk Utility. Run he command below to turn off core storage then you will be able to resize the drive.

diskutil cs revert /

I have no idea what is going on with that 51.3GB recovery partition though. I see this old post where Bootcamp made a 51.3GB partition, but it was not labelled as recovery like yours.

Do the convert then resize then and run the list commands again to see what we get.