Mac won't let me merge Patitions

Question

Level 1

2 points

Mac won't let me merge Patitions

On my MacBook pro I wanted to clean some stuff out and start a new so I created a new partition and put everything on that and erased the old partition and not I can't merge the old partition the subtract button is greyed out they are right next to each other on the disk but the space is the 2nd disk and Chicken my HD is the 4th is there a way that I can merge space into chicken or what would i have to do I've tried doing it in recovery mode that also didn't work the 3rd disk used to be the recovery partition but I thought if I deleted that and got that out of the way it might work but it didn't please help thx.

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *751.3 GB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS SPACE 373.0 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_HFS Chicken 377.8 GB disk0s4

Jonathans-MacBook-Pro:~ jonathansegal$

iMac with Retina 5K display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)

Posted on Feb 9, 2016 7:35 PM

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Answer 1

Lanny

Level 6

13,225 points

Feb 9, 2016 8:49 PM in response to lazzychicken

You can remove the 2nd partition and then enlarge the 1st partition to recover the space, but not the other way around.

You can clone your 2nd partition to an external drive, then repartition your internal drive to one partition, then clone from the external back to the internal.

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Answer 2

Lanny

Level 6

13,225 points

Feb 9, 2016 9:06 PM in response to lazzychicken

Or, you could clone your 2nd partition back to your 1st partition, then erase and remove the 2nd partition. Then enlarge the 1st partition to recover the space previously used by the 2nd partition.

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Answer 3

Sep 16, 2016 9:38 AM in response to lazzychicken

I have exactly the same problem. Did you got to fixed?

I am trying to merge the partitions on Diskutility so it will let me install windows again. (My old windows partition got damage so I erased the partition to try to install a new copy). The problem is that Bootcamp doesn't let me installed unless my I have only one partition.

(It basically saids that I must have my volume in one partition to install windows)

I have tried to merge the partitions in recovery mode, but nothing. I also tried to merge them using the live CD Gparted, but no patter what type of partition I put, It never let me resize the OSX partition, even I leave the other partion Unformatted. I also formated the partition as MS-DOS (FAT) to try to cheat on boot camp ,but nothing either.....

Any clues?

This is driving me crazy....

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Answer 4

Sep 16, 2016 9:41 AM in response to wilfred93

If you used Bootcamp then you should use the Bootcamp assistant to destroy the Bootcamp partition and devolve that space to the mac side.

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Answer 5

Sep 16, 2016 9:52 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Hello Luis,

Thanks for the reply. I already tried that, but I get error as you can see in the screenshot.

Thanks.

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Answer 6

Sep 16, 2016 10:04 AM in response to wilfred93

You need to clone your mac partition to an external drive, and completely erase your system drive, as a single partition.

Then clone your system back and, if desired, then use bootcamp assistant to create a windows partition.

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