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Disk Utility will not let me resize Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partitions

I have two partitions on mac, one for Mojave and another for El Capitan (For older software). As Mojave was made later, it is smaller, and I needed to resize. The resize handles are gone in Mojave and just split the volume in El Capitan. I want to adjust the size between them without data loss.

[Edit: Turns out the resize handles show up when you hold command, but have the same El Capitan behavior. They still split the El Capitan partition]

They are both HFS so that I didnt have to deal with APFS containers, and so I could access mojave data from El Capitan.

I would like some help figuring out how to resize these.

(Also, I tried to post the contents of DiskUtil list and diskutil cs list, but it wouldn't let me for some reason. They appear to be seperate logical groups, so if you know how to merge these somehow without data loss please help)

Posted on Aug 7, 2023 8:05 PM

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Posted on Aug 8, 2023 8:14 AM

Only the El Capitan partition has the space to be resized. You need to remove a portion of the El Capitan partition anyway. It is hard to say whether the freed space could be merged into the Mojave partition because it depends on which partition is the first one at the beginning of the drive and Disk Utility doesn't make it easy to determine the partition layouts in that regard. You also cannot be booted to the partition you are resizing. Probably best to try it from Recovery Mode or Internet Recovery Mode.


You may need to erase the whole SSD and start completely over by reinstalling macOS & restoring from a backup. Sometimes it just is not possible to resize partitions.


I hope you have a good backup of both volumes just in case something goes wrong since modifying partitions is a major & risky endeavor. This is why I always discourage anyone from creating multiple partitions on any drive because almost always at least one partition will not have enough space. It is much better to install a second OS on an external USB3 SSD or a second internal drive if the device supports it.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 8, 2023 8:14 AM in response to SgtSalmon

Only the El Capitan partition has the space to be resized. You need to remove a portion of the El Capitan partition anyway. It is hard to say whether the freed space could be merged into the Mojave partition because it depends on which partition is the first one at the beginning of the drive and Disk Utility doesn't make it easy to determine the partition layouts in that regard. You also cannot be booted to the partition you are resizing. Probably best to try it from Recovery Mode or Internet Recovery Mode.


You may need to erase the whole SSD and start completely over by reinstalling macOS & restoring from a backup. Sometimes it just is not possible to resize partitions.


I hope you have a good backup of both volumes just in case something goes wrong since modifying partitions is a major & risky endeavor. This is why I always discourage anyone from creating multiple partitions on any drive because almost always at least one partition will not have enough space. It is much better to install a second OS on an external USB3 SSD or a second internal drive if the device supports it.

Disk Utility will not let me resize Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partitions

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