How to restore the space from a deleted partition?

[gødspeed]

I tried yesterday to make a Boot Camp partition on my MacBook Pro 17"s 500GB hard drive, but something seems to have gone wrong while installing Windows 7. And the new partition was inaccessible from Disk Utility, so I deleted it by booting from the Windows 7 disk. But now the unallocated space from the deleted partition isn't showing up in disk utility, and I have now idea how to remerge it with my main Snow Leopard partition.

Ideas?

 

[SaSaSushi]

Run the Boot Camp Assistant in OS X (in /Applications/Utilities).

 

[gødspeed]

Tried that already.

"The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition."

 

[SaSaSushi]

In Disk Utility, when you click on the physical Hard Disk on the left (not the Macintosh HD partition) and then on the right click Partition, what does it show exactly?

I'm trying to figure out how Disk Utility could fail to see the free space or other partition if by some chance it was no deleted properly.

You should just be able to click on the bottom right of the Macintosh HD and drag it to the full size of the disk. On the bottom, is all the data correct for the drive?

 

[gødspeed]

Under volume scheme, it shows one partition ("Snow Leopard HD") taking up the whole rectangle; to the right of the volume scheme, under volume information, it says the size is 338.23GB (should be 500) and the available space is 338.23GB as well (don't understand that). If I select a different volume scheme, I have access to all 500.11GB again. But I would need to reformat in that case, which I'd really rather not do.

The info at the bottom, as far as I can tell, is correct. Total Capacity is 500.11GB, write status is Read/Write, SMART status is Verified, Partition Map Scheme is Master Boot Record.

One other small irregularity is that on the left in Disk Utility, the physical hard drive itself (not the 10.6 partition) has the icon that I used to use for my old Boot Camp partition, which I have not used for anything else in the mean time.

 

[gødspeed]

*bump* still haven't resolved this

 

[gødspeed]

This is getting weirder and weirder. I just tried to put a bootable 10.6 installation on my 16GB thumb drive, which is now showing up as having only 4.02GB overall volume capacity.

Anyway I booted from my 10.6 disk and in terminal tried to resize my main partition with fdisk, which failed.

Please, any ideas? I really need this space back, right now I have 15GB free which is not enough for the video editing I do.

 

[gødspeed]

In the hope that I haven't gotten a solution due to not explaining the problem properly, here's a screenshot of Disk Utility with the volume selected:

 

[mr666]

Not for the benefit of the OP, but this is an issue many people face, so it needs tying up, EVEN IF IT IS AN OLD POSTING.

You talk about using Disk Utility, but you don't mention OS X. Can you boot to OS X on the internal hard drive? If not, you have no usable partition scheme. The Windows DVD has changed the scheme to MBR. The computer cannot boot to that. Use Disk Utility > Partition tab > Options. Change the scheme to GUID, "OK", set for "1 partition", "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)", and "Apply".