Hard drive can not be partitioned after shutdown during prior partition

[Tim Hargreaves]

Whilst partitioning my Mac Hard Drive to install Windows 7 via the bootcamp assistant, my computer - oblivious to me until too late - ran out of charge. When I turned it back on, as expected, the was no completed partition and bootcamp assistant still gave me the option to partition my hard drive. When I tried to partition my drive however, I get an error stating that:

Disk could not be partitioned

An error occurred while partitioning the disk

I assume this is because I already have a semi-complete partition existing.

More reason to think this is apparent when I ran the disk utility application and saw that despite there only being one drive (Macintosh HD) This only took up 450Gb (Out of 500Gb) - the rest blank. Since my partition was 50Gb, you would assume that that is what is taking up that space and disabling a new partition.

Any idea of how I can fix this?

 

[Bruno09]

Do you have a clone or a bootable USB stick or DVD, to Check/Repair the whole internal drive via its Disk Utility ?

 

[Gav Mack]

Or try the recovery partition disk utility as the boot drive will be unmounted. You should be able to resize it back in there.