Can I remove an EFI Partition from my Internal Data only HDD on a Mac Pro

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Level 1

51 points

Can I remove an EFI Partition from my Internal Data only HDD on a Mac Pro

Looking at something else in the Terminal with Diskutil, I noticed that my non boot data only HDD's on my Mac Pro have EFi partitions.

OK< so on a 4TB drive a 200Mb partition is nothing, but just the principle of it

The boot drive is APFS and I am leaving that well alone, but i have 2 other 4TB Data only HDD's, one is imported photos and video and the other is iPhoto and iTunes libraries.

As far a my understanding goes , they are not needed...can i just delete them?

OSx Mojave on Mac Pro 5,1

Mac Pro, macOS 10.14

Posted on Nov 9, 2024 11:50 AM

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Answer 1

g_wolfman

Level 4

2,056 points

Nov 9, 2024 2:51 PM in response to Neil Paisnel

You perhaps could remove them...but given that mucking around with disk operations at that low a level are a good way to corrupt a disk and lose data, the question is should you.

I think no. What you should do is nothing. Not for 200 MB, not even as a matter of principle - which it isn't anyway.

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Answer 2

HWTech

Level 9

60,326 points

Nov 11, 2024 11:50 AM in response to Neil Paisnel

Modifying partitions is always risky. Besides I don't think you will be able to join that partition into the main partition. You can only join a partition to the one in front of it. If you decide to muck around with it, then I hope you have a good backup first. It really is not worth the risk, or time involved to worry about it since macOS hides it from view by default. Just ignore it.

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Answer 3

Neil Paisnel Author

Level 1

51 points

Nov 10, 2024 2:26 AM in response to Neil Paisnel

I mounted them and, yes, they are empty, even when showing hidden files or viewing in terminal, unlike an EFi partition on a boot disk.

I was just wondering if having an EFi partition was the reason these Data only drives come up as bootable drives, when the computer is started with the Alt key held.

I have some new bigger SSD Drives on the way, so once the data is cloned and verified across to the new, I am taking these drives out any way.

thanks for taking the time for the reply

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