How to Un-Partition Hard Drive

Discussion in 'macOS' started by jan08, Dec 14, 2009.

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  1. jan08, Dec 14, 2009

    jan08 macrumors regular

    Joined:
    Oct 20, 2006
    Location:
    Wakefield, England
    #1
    I've just bought a used iMac and for some reason it has 3 partitons but two have nothing on them. I've gone into Disk Utility and deleted those two but now the main Partition is still only showing as having 80GB of free space instead of the 200GB it should have. What can I do?
     
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  2. madog, Dec 14, 2009

    madog macrumors 65816

    madog

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    Nov 25, 2004
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    Korova Milkbar
    #2
    There could be some third party utility (as BootCamp can do it, it must be possible some how), but normally you can only erase everything to reclaim the partitions as one.

    If the machine has Leopard on it, you maaaaaay be able to use BootCamp to reclaim the partitions, but I don't know how that works with partitions that weren't initially made with it (or otherwise aren't formatted as MS-DOS). Never tried that one.
     
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  3. maflynn, Dec 14, 2009

    maflynn Moderator

    maflynn

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    Joined:
    May 3, 2009
    Location:
    Boston
    #3
    You need to run the disk utility from the install disk. You cannot alter the partition of a drive that you booted up from.

    You have a couple of options generally speaking, just manually delete the partitions and grow the main one. This is typically non-destructive or just select 1 partition from the drop down menu within the partition area with disk utility. This is destructive so you will lose all of your data and will need to reinstall OSX.

    either way, make sure you have your system backed up before performing any drive maintenance.
     
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