Removing a Partition

[hughvane]

[I've searched the posts back 6 months, but nothing there for my question.]

I've very recently bought a G3 iMac 600. The seller did everything right and presented me with a clean install of Panther. However he'd also partitioned the 40 Gb HD into 20 and 17 respectively, with the OS on the larger partition.

Since purchase, I've reinstalled Panther from my own retail disks, and updated to 10.3.9. All is well EXCEPT the second partition remains, I do not need it, and I will in due course want to use that space for applications, and other files.

How do I remove the second 17 Gb partition without affecting the primary 20 Gb one?
Will I have to re-reinstall the OS after reclaiming the second partition?
[Hopefully not, the update alone was 118 Mb.]

 

[MarkMS]

Have you checked this thread?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/283549/

Anyway, the only ones I know are iPartition and Disk Utility (built into OS X). I'm not certain, but I think the Leopard version of Disk Utility is the only version of Disk Utility that can do this nondestructively.

 

[jodelli]

AFAIK the only non-destructive partitioning is Intel only. I may be wrong on this.
Partitioning or re-partitioning on a G3 iMac HDD should be done before installing the OS, if you don't want to lose anything.

 

[cpjakes]

If you have an external hard drive, you can create an image of your boot disk, wipe the internal drive, and restore it from your image. That way you won't lose a single setting or file. You can do this with Disk Utility starting up from the installation discs.

 

[hughvane]

Firstly, thank you to all respondents for your assistance.

I cloned the HD contents to an ext HD and then reformatted the HD with just one partition. Then a bit of a fubar when I tried to reinstall Panther from an update disk (same color and disk number as the original - must read the fine print!), but got that sorted out. Reinstalled Panther from the correct disk, updated with the second Disk 1, and then reinstated the 10.3.9 stuff from the EHD. Phew! Report mission accomplished.

 

[cpjakes]

For future reference, if the install was fine before you changed the partitioning, cloning to the external doesn't require reinstalling the system. You can just restore everything from the image as the system is there too.

cpjakes

 

[hughvane]

For future reference, if the install was fine before you changed the partitioning, cloning to the external doesn't require reinstalling the system. You can just restore everything from the image as the system is there too.

cpjakes

Thank you cpj, but the errors didn't end at the wrong install disk. In my ignorance, being a first-time use of CCCloner, I did not create a disk image on the ext HD, but simply cloned to it all the folders from the updated OS before reinstalling from scratch. Okay, I can transfer them back again, and I'm assuming the resident system folders will be overwritten. If not, I'll do the final Panther update from the online system. That in fact may be the safer method.