Difficulty reformatting SSD

Question

I have a Transcend 960gb SSD installed in a mid 2012 MacBook ProThe drive is split into two partitions, I want to reformat them into one.In Disk Utility the drive shows as two separate volumes???sh-3.2# diskutil list/dev/disk0   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *960.2 GB   disk0   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         879.5 GB   disk0s2   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3   4:          Apple_CoreStorage                         79.1 GB    disk0s4   5:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s5/dev/disk1   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER   0:                  Apple_HFS Piha                   *78.7 GB    disk1                                 Logical Volume on disk0s4                                 20AA659B-DDB9-4626-81E2-DE231915B650                                 Unencrypted/dev/disk2   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER   0:                  Apple_HFS Yosemite               *879.1 GB   disk2                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2                                 10964BE8-5E57-4961-870B-C51C79FD1B0E                                 UnencryptedThis is the same if I use the Disk Utility application from the Utilities folder or when I use disk utility after booting from the Recovery partition.

dwb · Answer

Partitioning a drive creates logical volumes, that’s how it works. When you partition the drive the operating system sees each partition as a hard drive. There are two ways to go about making the SSD into a one partition drive. Theoretically you can delete disk2 (the last partition) and then resize disk1 to give it the space that was allocated to disk2. I say theoretically because sometimes it just doesn’t work. In this case it doesn’t make much sense to do so since disk2 contains your boot partition so you’ll have to reinstall the OS (or restore from a backup).On to method 2 - reparation the drive with 1 partition. Start Disk Utility, select the SSD, and click on the Partition tab. You’ll see a popup menu saying “2 partitions”. Click on that and select 1 partition. Click on Apply. The drive will be partitioned. This will remove the Recovery Partition so you’ll need to restore the Recovery Partition - if you made a clone of your drive with CarbonCopyCloner it can restore it, otherwise, download and reinstall the OS.

KarelWH · Answer

The two logical volumes show up in Disk utility as separate drives. Hence there is no way to select the SSD. When you select the volume associated with either of these "separate" drives you can see the two partitions but the option to choose a different partition scheme is greyed out. (Even though I booted from the recovery portion or from an external drive) I have partitioned drives for years and never come across this problem. I wish I could attach a screen shot from Disk Utility)