Rebuilding External SSD Partition Maps

[hidea]

Hey all,


I've been trying to rebuild an external SSD (repurposed, from what is once an internal hackintosh drive).

There are two partitions in the drive that can be detected by 'diskutil list' in terminal.

disk1s1 is labelled as 'EFI' and it's a FAT32 partition (used for the Hackintosh bootloader)
disk1s2 is labelled as 'CLONE' (I'm currently using this partition as a Carbon Copy Clone drive)

Disk Utility won't even show disk1s1 (or any EFI-labelled partitions, I'm assuming this is a precautionary measure?)

I was wondering if I can just destroy both partitions and remerge everything as a single partition, since I have no need for disk1s1 anymore; but I've had zero luck with rebuilding the drive's partition map.

Any pointers? Thanks in advance!

 

[Weaselboy]

Go back to Disk Utility and in the erase tab select the drive brand name at the very top of the left column (like Seagate 1TB or whatever). Then pick Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in the dropdown and apply that format. That will wipe the entire drive and all those partitions.

 

[hidea]

Go back to Disk Utility and in the erase tab select the drive brand name at the very top of the left column (like Seagate 1TB or whatever). Then pick Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in the dropdown and apply that format. That will wipe the entire drive and all those partitions.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work. Seems like Disk Utility is designed in such a way to protect accidental deletion of critical partitions.

 

[Weaselboy]

Hmm... just did a test erase on an external drive and it does make that hidden EFI volume at 290.7MB, so looks like that is the default behavior.

Why are you concerned about removing it?

 

[DeltaMac]

Disk Utility -
click on the manufacturer's info line (not the name of the drive, but the line that shows what kind of drive, such as the model number.
Click the Partitions tab.
Change Partition Layout to 1 Partition, then click the Apply button. That will absolutely take your hard drive to normal OS X defaults.
The EFI partition will be there, too, but is normally hidden. You can view that partition by making all partitions visible in the debug menu in Disk Utility. You have to turn that menu on manually.
Here's one method to get that menu.

 

[hidea]

Hmm... just did a test erase on an external drive and it does make that hidden EFI volume at 290.7MB, so looks like that is the default behavior.

Why are you concerned about removing it?

Ah, good spotting! I didn't realize that's the default behaviour, creating an EFI, FAT32 partition.

Well, I wanted to wipe it because it had left over bootloader files from the previous Hackintosh I had. Somehow, when I was using it as a Startup Disk (it's an external SSD), it loaded the hackintosh bootloader too. Seems unnecessary and wanted to wipe the SSD clean from any traces hackintosh bootloader files.

Thanks guys! Clarified everything .