CyrusD wrote:
What is the best way to go about cleaning this mess up?
First
Disconnect all drives, including TimeMachine.
Hold c and boot off the 10.6 install disk and under the Utilities menu is Disk Utility, use that to Repair Disk, that will fix the issue with the unfinished partition on the boot drive.
However despite what the chart and program shows, your "free space" isn't all in one piece to make a partition at the end of the drive, the free space is broken up all over the drive, so, you need to shift all the data up towards the front part of the drive. To do this...
Next.
Get a blank external drive about 500GB+ (not too big 1TB enough), Firewire or USB and format it GUID OS X Extended (journaled) under the Partition tab in Disk Utility. If the drive hasn't been Zero Erased before, then do that first before formatting.
Now get yourself a donation/free copy of Carbon Copy Cloner and clone the 10.6 drive to the external drive, once finished you can hold the option key down and boot from it. Check it out well that it works just like before.
Use Disk Utility to Repair Permissions on both boot drive and the clone.
Finally,
option boot from the clone, use Disk Utility to erase with security option "zero all data" the internal 10.6 boot drive, wait for it to finish (about a hour).
You can chose at this time to format the partitions under the partition tab in Disk Utility. 🙂
Now run Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the clone drive to the first internal drive partition (for OS X), reboot to this partition and Disk Utility > Repair Permissions on both drives.
(If your computer hangs upon booting, flashing question mark), reboot and hold the option key down and select the first OS X partition on the internal drive, set the System Preference > Startup disk and that will cure that issue if it arises.)
Now all your data from the clone has been optimized and compacted to fill the very beginning of the hard drive on the first partition. The second partition has it's space at the end of the drive and is free of data until you add some.
Not only that, the Zero erase mapped off any bad sectors. Disk Utility hangs on failed sectors while it makes a second partition while booted from the same drive, this started occuring in 10.6.8 for some reason. The Zero Erase of free space seems to cure it.