Delete partition from external hard drive

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Level 1

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Delete partition from external hard drive

I use Macbook Air 2014 on OS X El Capitan with external hard drive. Current OS is pretty old, but for my basic needs it works fine. Some time ago I had to use modern software so I decided to install the new OS on my external hard drive.

There were 3 partitions created: 200 Gb for Time Machine, 230 Gb for file storage and 70 Gb for Big Sur OS.

Since then I didn't use Big Sur, so now I want to free that partition. The idea is to leave 2 partitions: 200 Gb for Time Machine and 300 Gb for file storage.

I have erased this 70 Gb partition, however the partition itself is not deletable. What I'm trying to do - open disk utility tool, choose the external drive, then "Split into partitions". Then I want to click 'minus' button for this partition, but the button is grayed out.

Any ideas?

MacBook Air 13″, OS X 10.11

Posted on Feb 2, 2024 1:01 AM

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Answer 1

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Top-ranking reply

ilyahimself Author

Level 1

24 points

Feb 18, 2024 1:14 AM in response to Need_help_give_help

Thank you for the advice. I guess erasing / reformatting the whole drive will help. I just hoped there would be a smarter solution to heal this partition.

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Answer 2

Feb 16, 2024 4:16 AM in response to ilyahimself

I don't believe you can delete the first partition so you might be stuck with 5.5Gb first partition.

To get around this you will probably have to copy the data from the two partitions you want to keep to another hard drive. Reformat the drive afresh and make the smallest first partition you can plus however many more partitions you want. If you want to delete partitions again you won't need to delete the first one as using little space.

Copying time machine data isn't easy. I did that with SuperDuper recently, it took 16 hours for ~400GB.