Christopher Murphy wrote:
I agree that Boot Camp Assistant should be used to remove the BOOTCAMP partition containing Windows.
But it's egregious that Disk Utility allows modification of the disk in a manner that borks the partition maps to the point no provided utilities, including Boot Camp Assistant, can fix. And in fact Disk Utility's behavior violates Apple's on dev noteon the issue: it should not be modifying disks with hybrid MBRs, in particular if it will result in data loss or disk space loss both of which are possible when manipulating a such a disk with Disk Utility. This is absolutely not user error.
If you have no backup your data is likely lost.
The data is not at risk. He has 32GB of free space that he can't reclaim for Mac OS X. This is often managable with diskutil resizevolume command, but the limits need to be determined before attempting it because inexplicably the command sometimes fails due to the presence of Recovery HD in between the Mac OS volume and Free Space. Even then, it's possible to move Recovery HD to the end of the disk and then resize the HFS+ volume. But I'm not aware of any utilities that can do this automagically once the situation is off the standard set of rails.
We are not debating the operation of Didk Utility.
The original poster did not follow the procedure for removing a Boot Camp partition and is now faced with the possibly refomatting his hard drive. This will cause loss of everything on the drive.
If you have an issue with how Disk Utility works you should let Apple know how "egregious" Disk Utility is. We are just users here and can do nothing about the design of Disk Utility or other Apple applications.