Messed up partitions

Question

Messed up partitions

Dear all,

I have encountered a problem while I was trying to install Windows 10 via Boot Camp Assistant and my partitions have gone all crazy. Would appreciate your help in resolving this mess.

I have a late 2013 iMac High Sierra with two drives, no Fusion. SSD (boot drive) and HDD with all the data. I wanted to do have Windows 10 on my HDD with at least 150 Gb and something went wrong.

I need to return the initial state of my HDD without any harm done, i.e. formatting and/or losing all the data. Or, if it is impossible to do, just clearing up the partition mess would be a victory.

My diskutil list is as follows:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *251.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            250.1 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3


/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS                         0 B        disk1s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS                         3.1 KB     disk1s7
   4:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HDD           847.0 GB   disk1s3
   5:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk1s4
   6:       Microsoft Basic Data BC2                     151.7 GB   disk1s5

I do understand that this mess may be undone only through Terminal and possessing great knowledge. I'm no good with Terminal, since my efforts have caused to the creation of Apple_HFS with 0 B and 3.1 B...

Any help will be appreciated.

Kind regards,

SSG

iMac 27", macOS 10.13

Posted on Nov 3, 2019 7:49 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Supersoberguy Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 4, 2019 8:11 AM in response to BDAqua

OK, Disk Utility was giving all kind of errors and it was impossible to do any partition removal from it. So I did a complete removal of all partitions and finally formatted my HDD as one whole drive without any messy partitions. It was faster and easier to do since I backed up all of the files and had freedom in experimenting. In case if that can help anybody here is what I did:

Went into recovery mode (ALT + CMD + R at the start up), since I need to boot into utilities that are not stationed on my target drive that I am willing to erase
Went into terminal and did the following:
Typed "diskutil list"
Confirmed that my disk was disk0
Then typed "diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0"
Then typed "gpt destroy /dev/disk0"
Type "exit" to finish
Went into Disk Utility and formatted my HDD.

Now my "diskutil list" is nice and clean. Big thanks goes to klanomath that wrote necessary steps found in this source.

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

240,827 points

Nov 3, 2019 9:32 AM in response to Supersoberguy

SSG, did you already use Bootcamp to remove the Bootcamp partition?

My report from 10.13.6

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 499.2 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *6.0 TB disk1

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1

2: Apple_HFS 1013 1.7 TB disk1s2

3: Apple_Boot 650.0 MB disk1s3

4: Apple_HFS 1012 401.3 GB disk1s4

5: Apple_Boot 650.0 MB disk1s5

6: Apple_HFS 10.10 505.4 GB disk1s6

7: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk1s7

8: Apple_HFS 10.9 749.6 GB disk1s8

9: Apple_HFS 10.11 750.1 GB disk1s9

10: Apple_HFS 10.6 550.1 GB disk1s10

11: Apple_HFS 10.8 579.3 GB disk1s11

12: Apple_HFS 10.7 750.1 GB disk1s12

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk2

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1

2: Apple_HFS SSD 2TB 2.0 TB disk2s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk2s3

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Answer 3

dot.com

Level 4

2,455 points

Nov 3, 2019 9:54 AM in response to Supersoberguy

Personally, if this were on my system I would not loose sleep over the unusual sized partitions. They won't cause any harm that I can think of.

What exactly did you do to cause them to be created? It looks to me your macOS X boot disk is 250GB disk0 disk, and the second 1TB disk has another HFS partition that is 847GB and the Windows disk is 151.7GB. Does the Bootcamp disk boot up windows OK? Is all your data on the 847GB partition OK?

The only odd thing that I see is the naming of the partitions is a bit confusing -- ie. disk1s7 is the third physical partition, disk1s3 is the fourth physical partition, disk1s4 is the fifth physical partition and disk1s5 is the sixth physical partition. Normally these partition "names" indicate the physical partition, but not always, and especially not with newer APFS filesystems.

If you really want to clean up the current situation, you're looking at a day or two of work (mostly involved in waiting for the various copy and restore of partitions). If you wish to go forward with this, please confirm.

Good luck...

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Answer 4

Nov 3, 2019 7:15 PM in response to BDAqua

Dear BDAqua, thanks for your reply!

Yes, I did erase previous Bootcamp partition with BCA. This partition added up nicely to my existing 750 GB of HDD to add up to a total 1 TB of space.

I then again opened up BCA and wanted to install Windows 10 this time. BCA partitioned my HDD, iMac restarted and started the installation process.

Unfortunately, when I had to choose the Bootcamp partition, it gave me an error with this partition. I tried formatting it from within the Windows Installation, but to no avail.

Afterwards, when I tried to boot again into installation USB or DVD (I tried both of them), I do not boot anywhere - I only have black screen and nothing happens... It seems like it freezes all the time.

That's a story so far.

And this is because I thought that those partitions were the problem.

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Answer 5

Nov 3, 2019 7:22 PM in response to dot.com

Dear dot.com,

thank you for your reply.

To answer your first question, I tried some commands from within the terminal after I wanted to merge two partitions. It gave me an error and new partition of 0B was created. I then tried again to do the same operation, but it created second partition with 3.7B...

To answer your second question, no, bootcamp does not boot

OK. I have written in the post above the pre story with bootcamp - i erased previous win7 and wanted to install new win10. The post opens up the situation more in depth.

I would like to clean up this mess. I already backed up all of the data from my HDD in order to start something with no fear.

Yes, I can confirm that I am ready to go forward with this and with your help.

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