MP 7,1 Legacy(?) Recovery HD partition on SATA SSD?

[mattspace]

So in doing a bit of a tidy-up & troubleshoot, it’s come to my attention that one of my internal SATA SSDs (which saw use on a previous High Sierra machine), which is APFS formatted seems to have an Apple_Boot Recovery HD partition on it, which won’t show up anywhere except for running running diskutil list in terminal.

~ % diskutil list                                                                       
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk3         999.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but this isn’t used by anything currently, is it? There’s not some weird thing 7,1s do when a SATA disk is connected as disk0, is there? I'm assuming this is a High Sierra Recovery partition, correct?

Figuring out how to get rid of it is mildly annoying, because I can’t find a definitive answer on whether it can be removed and the space recovered without reformatting / repartitioning the whole drive.

Any thoughts?

 

[reader50]

You can check the macOS version in the Recovery partition by:

sudo diskutil mount /dev/disk0s3

(enter admin password)

/Recovery HD/com.apple.recovery.boot/SystemVersion.plist

Since it's the last partition on the disk, you could delete it. Then resize the partition right before it to absorb the free space. But for just 650 MB, I might not bother. If you're that tight for space, it's time to upgrade.

 

[mattspace]

You can check the macOS version in the Recovery partition by:

sudo diskutil mount /dev/disk0s3

(enter admin password)

/Recovery HD/com.apple.recovery.boot/SystemVersion.plist

Since it's the last partition on the disk, you could delete it. Then resize the partition right before it to absorb the free space. But for just 650 MB, I might not bother. If you're that tight for space, it's time to upgrade.

Thanks, OK so it's a 10.13.6 recovery partition, as I suspected it might be.

It's mounted on the desktop, but doesn't show in Disk Utility's GUI - the pie chart for the device shows a pinstriped section that's the APFS container, but the HFS+ section lacks pinstipes, and can't be selected or interacted with.

I presume there's a sequence of needing to first erase the HFS+ partition then, what, convert it to APFS as a part of that process, before merging it back ti the others?

 

[mattspace]

Ahh sorted it, my OCD is now appeased.

first step was:

diskutil eraseVolume free free disk0s3

then in Disk Utility merely adjusting the pie wedges wasn't sufficient, it always left a bit of free space remaining, with an asterisk next to it. I had to select that Free space sliver and delete it.

Now the drive is reporting the same 1TB size as the other, matching drive.