David Kuhlmann
Level 1
(15 points)
Q: Boot Camp Partition ate some of my disk
So partitioned for boot camp. Found that it's not wise to do that when you have other hubs or thunderbolt drives plugged in. In the windows setup, I partitioned the drive (since it needs to be NTFS instead of FAT32...who knows why boot camp formats into a format that then needs to be formatted).
When I booted back into the mac space, boot camp assistant no longer recognized the boot camp partition (since it had been formatted like it needs to be) and couldn't see anything to delete. So I opened up disk utility. Disk utility couldn't delete any of the partitions or merge them back with my HD. So I went into internet recovery where the old disk utility thankfully lives and deleted the partitions from there. I was able to remove them but the space allocated for BootCamp is still unavailable to me. I try to extend the main partition to take advantage of the free space, but it fails each time.
Now, I have a 1tb drive of which only 867gb is usable and boot camp assistant still thinks that space is taken up for boot camp (even though there's no partition!)
Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)
Loner T
Level 7
(23,898 points)
David Kuhlmann wrote:
So partitioned for boot camp. Found that it's not wise to do that when you have other hubs or thunderbolt drives plugged in. In the windows setup, I partitioned the drive (since it needs to be NTFS instead of FAT32...who knows why boot camp formats into a format that then needs to be formatted).
This is not supported. Using BCA or DU are the two supported methods on a Mac. OS X has no read-write license for NTFS (among other reasons), so it creates a FAT32 partition, which is then re-formatted to NTFS by Windows installer. Please see https://help.apple.com/bootcamp/assistant/6.0/ for documentation and details.
When I booted back into the mac space, boot camp assistant no longer recognized the boot camp partition (since it had been formatted like it needs to be) and couldn't see anything to delete.
It did not recognize Windows partition because there is a special structure called a Hybrid MBR which was erased when you used the Windows installer for partitioning/formatting.
So I opened up disk utility. Disk utility couldn't delete any of the partitions or merge them back with my HD. So I went into internet recovery where the old disk utility thankfully lives and deleted the partitions from there. I was able to remove them but the space allocated for BootCamp is still unavailable to me. I try to extend the main partition to take advantage of the free space, but it fails each time.
BCA knows how to merge the partitions correctly, DU does not. It will continue to fail.
Now, I have a 1tb drive of which only 867gb is usable and boot camp assistant still thinks that space is taken up for boot camp (even though there's no partition!)
This is because your OS X 'partition' is actually a Logical volume, not a partition anymore.
Unless you want to learn some tricks in OS X Terminal, my recommendation is to
1. Backup OSX and all your files - Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac - Apple Support .
2. Boot into Internet Recovery (Command+Opt+R) - OS X: About OS X Recovery - Apple Support .
3. Click on Utilties -> Disk Utility and Erase your internal whole disk.
4. Restore OSX and your files - Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac - Apple Support .
This requires a separate external disk which can accommodate TM backup - Backup disks you can use with Time Machine - Apple Support .
