After deleting Boot Camp partition, 'free space' is unaccessible!

Question

After deleting Boot Camp partition, 'free space' is unaccessible!

Hi. 🙂

I'm having problems with my partitions on my MacBook Pro, 15", early 2011, 750GB.

Because of school, I had to install Windows 7 on my MacBook. So I created a 76GB partition with Boot Camp. Everything went well, until I decided to erase Windows 7. It was the end of the school year and I wanted to get rid of it. Whilst deleting it with Boot Camp, an error came up and after that, I noticed Disk Utility showed that there was a grey rectangle called 'free space' on the place where my Windows partition used to be with a size of 76GB. Now I can't use that free space anymore.

As you can see, I can not press the '-' button or the 'options' button. (My MacBook uses the Dutch language, since I'm from Belgium.)

I can't even switch places with the existing Macintosh HD partition. What I can do, is turning that 'free space' (called vrije ruimte on the picture) into another structure as mac os extended or MS DOS or ..., so I tried that with the thought I could delete it afterwards so that there was a 750GB partition again, but that didn't work eather. I could not adjust the size, only delete it, so the 'free space' went grey again.

I've read tons of topics about this issue, but so far I haven't found a solution. But I really need that space right now. I would really, REALLY, appreciate it if someone could help me with this. I'm getting really tired of this problem.

Thanks in advance.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Nov 11, 2012 10:38 AM

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Answer 1

dalstott

Level 4

2,639 points

Nov 11, 2012 1:37 PM in response to Jolien Augustyns

CampTune to the rescue.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/camptune/

In the past, to reallocate free space on your Mac, you’d need to back up the Boot Camp partition, delete the partition, recreate an NTFS partition with a new size and, finally, restore the Windows partition backup to the new NTFS partition, a process that could take anywhere between two to five hours. Fortunately, Paragon Software has developed Camptune X, which achieves the same result in a matter of minutes!

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Answer 2

Nov 13, 2012 5:10 AM in response to Jolien Augustyns

That didn't do the trick either!

But in the mean time, I did found a solution. I decided to do a clean install for other reasons. So when I booted from my instal DVD, I started Disk Utility again. In the past, when I used Disk Utility, I couldn't change the partitions to one to get the free space back. But now I booted from the DVD and could change it to one partition and I got my free space back! Downside: you have to format your whole disk, but since I was goint to do a clean install, that wasn't a problem for me.

Thanks anyway!

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