Removed windows partition now have un-formattable free space

[dj95]

Hi all

Help needed please!

I attempted to remove my windows bootcamp partition using bootcamp assistant, and the assistant got about 3/4 through partitioning back to a single drive and produced an error akin to being unable to complete the process and the disk needed to be repaired. However windows was actually gone and now I'm left with 50gb of 'free space', which can't be formatted to anything using disk utility and my mac partition can't be dragged down into the free space using disk utility either. After looking online I booted into the recovery partition, repaired disk etc. and still nothing. In internet recovery I can't erase the whole disk, just the mac partition which I assume won't achieve anything as the 'free space' will still be there as its not being erased.

Is there anything else I can try? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[dj95]

Ok update:

As a 'this won't do anything but might as well try' last attempt, I added a second partition to the original mac partition, creating two, and for some reason that made the free space disappear. I then deleted the new partition and seem to have full disk capacity now as a single partition for 'Macintosh HD'. Only thing thats odd is that if I hold option at boot, the old windows partition still shows, but when selected at the boot menu it blue screens and says windows needs to be repaired, so I have no idea how I would get rid of that...

 

[Fishrrman]

Yours is not the first post here from someone who has ended up with a partition that can't seem to be removed.

There is a nearly-guaranteed way to be rid of it, but it involves several steps and you need an external drive.

Procedure:
1. Use either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to clone your boot partition to an external drive.
2. Boot from the cloned backup drive
3. Use Disk Utility to Re-initialize your INTERNAL drive to ONE partition
4. RE-CLONE the contents of the cloned backup BACK TO the internal drive.