How to get free space back on external hard drive partition

[placidity44]

My external hard drive is used for time machine and I partitioned it for El Capitan but once I deleted the partition it says Free Space with a format of free space and it won't let me change the format or merge the free space with my HDD The capacity is 999 gb exactly but it's showing 929 as the capacity. Looking for a free way to do it and not pay for disk drill. Some help would be much appreciated.

 

[Weaselboy]

With the external attached run the command below and tell us what it says. This will show the volume layout.

It may be that the El Capitan install turned the drive into a core storage volume that we will need to revert.

diskutil list

 

[Burton8219]

With the external attached run the command below and tell us what it says. This will show the volume layout.

It may be that the El Capitan install turned the drive into a core storage volume that we will need to revert.

diskutil list

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I have a similar problem and I think the El Capitan partition I made got turned into core storage... I got this readout when I ran that command through terminal.

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.3 GB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 413.6 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

4: Apple_CoreStorage 65.2 GB disk0s4

5: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s5

/dev/disk1

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: Apple_HFS El Cap *64.8 GB disk1

Logical Volume on disk0s4

B6F22C30-3023-4EF6-8BF7-0D627916868E

Unencrypted

UPDATE: Disregard... Reverted the partition from Core storage back to regular storage and we're ok.