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Hello,
I have been trying to merge two partitions of my external hard drive. One partition is empty and the other one has Time Machine backup. Since my Mac size has grown, I cannot accommodate that in one partition and hence the need to extend. In disk utility, I see that the Partition button is not clickable. I have run First aid on the 2 partitions individually, but that did not help either. The external drive is not selectable either.
Mac Pro
I think you might just use Disk Utility to erase and reformat the disk. That will restore one partition. Yes, you will have lost your old Time Machine backups, but you can then have it do a new backup and it will fully back up your hard drive. Any problem doing that?
I think you might just use Disk Utility to erase and reformat the disk. That will restore one partition. Yes, you will have lost your old Time Machine backups, but you can then have it do a new backup and it will fully back up your hard drive. Any problem doing that?
Actually I was hoping I could retain the old data and extend to the new partition as seen in a separate thread on a similar issue (to have my earlier backups just in case). Looks like there is no option other than removing the old data. I did that eventually and it worked. Thanks for the suggestion.
DiGi0000 wrote:
Actually I was hoping I could retain the old data and extend to the new partition as seen in a separate thread on a similar issue (to have my earlier backups just in case). Looks like there is no option other than removing the old data. I did that eventually and it worked. Thanks for the suggestion.
This is why a backup drive should be dedicated only to backups. I don't believe a user should ever have multiple partitions on a drive because users will always run out of room sooner or later. Yes I used to be guilty of this too.
Ronasara wrote:
I agree with you. Even though I suggested a partition as a possible solution, I would not personally do it.
I was just trying to add to your excellent response so that the OP and any other users reading the thread would hopefully think twice about adding or resizing partitions. We've both seen way too many threads on these forums where users run into this unfortunate situation or even worse since they've actually lost access to their data.
I agree with you. Even though I suggested a partition as a possible solution, I would not personally do it.
Merging partitions of external hard drive
