Help with unusable free space on hard disk

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Level 1

13 points

Help with unusable free space on hard disk

Let me explain. Today I decided to downgrade my MacBook Air (early 2008) to snow leopard. I had Lion. What I did was to create a new partition, install snow leopard there, pass my files using migration assistant from the old partition using lion, and then after I verify everything was copied, I deleted the lion partition. What I didn't see coming, was that I can't make my current partition any larger, even though I have more than half of the hard disk free. Please help me, I'm running out of space!

Mac OS X (10.7.3), MacBook Air 1.1 (2008)

Posted on May 3, 2015 1:00 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

dwb

Level 7

32,920 points

May 5, 2015 5:41 PM in response to app61

Basically you can drag a partition DOWN to make it larger but not UP

There are two possible methods to fix this.

1) use disk utility to create a partition in the space above your current partition (In some instances this won’t work but it usually is possible. If not then look at method 2 below.

2) clone the contents of the current partition to the newly created partition. See #1 below for the software I use for cloning

3) delete the 2nd partition (the one you made yesterday)

4) resize the newest partition to fill the drive. (this should work)

Method 2

1) clone the current working partition to a hard drive (CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper)

2) restart the computer with your installation disk

3) run Disk Utility and create 1 partition

4) restart the computer with the cloned external drive

5) copy the external drive contents to the computer

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Answer 2

app61 Author

Level 1

13 points

May 5, 2015 5:43 PM in response to dwb

Thanks a lot. I used method 1 and after deleting the old partition I was able to enlarge the space on the new partition. Now I'm using the whole disk.

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Answer 3

dwb

Level 7

32,920 points

May 5, 2015 5:56 PM in response to app61

Great! I ran into a similar problem myself shortly after Apple made it possible to resize partitions and repartition on the fly. That’s when I learned that you can’t move the top of the partition up.

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