How does the disk partitioner work?

[solinari6]

Before I installed El Capitan, I partitioned my 250gig hard drive to: Yosemite: 210gigs, El Capitan 40gigs.

Then I installed El Capitan on the 40 gig drive, so I could dual boot. So now I'm happy with El Capitan, and have thoroughly backed up my Yosemite stuff.

I want to delete the Yosemite partition, and resize the El Capitan one to take up the full drive, but can't for the life of me figure this out.

I'm using the disk utility, and erased the yosemite partition. Then I click on the main hard drive disk, and hit the partition button. I would think that at this point, I would just highlight the yosemite partition, and click the "-" button to get rid of it. But that isn't an option. So I figure maybe need to resize the partition use the drag partition option? Well that didn't work either, I ended up with 3 partitions.

The only thing that it will let me do, is click on the El Captian parition, then hit the "-" button ... but I'm not sure that's what I want ... that seems like it would delete the el capitan partition, right?

The new disk utility tool is very confusing. PLUS, it keeps putting a pop up (telling me the disk size) right over the little doo-hicky I'm supposed to grab to resize things. ARGH

 

[chrfr]

Before I installed El Capitan, I partitioned my 250gig hard drive to: Yosemite: 210gigs, El Capitan 40gigs... I want to delete the Yosemite partition, and resize the El Capitan one to take up the full drive, but can't for the life of me figure this out.

OS X doesn't allow you to delete the first partition on the disk. (This isn't new in 10.11 El Capitan.) What you can do is boot into the recovery partition, erase (not delete) the Yosemite partition, and then clone your El Capitan partition to the now empty Yosemite partition. Once you've done that, then delete the existing 10.11 partition, and then expand the first partition to use the entire disk.

 

[solinari6]

Ah, that makes sense. My partitions are all screwed up though ... the first partition somehow got sized down to 5.6 gigs, and there wasn't anything I could do to make it any bigger. Very strange .... and in my attempt to merge the other 2 partitions, I erased EVERYTHING. oops. So now I'm in recovery mode, downloading/installing Yosemite on the remaining 245 gig partition. I guess I'll just have an extra 5 gig partition laying around. Once that's done I'll update it to El Capitan, and then I'll pretty fairly close to what I had wanted.

 

[benthewraith]

Ah, that makes sense. My partitions are all screwed up though ... the first partition somehow got sized down to 5.6 gigs, and there wasn't anything I could do to make it any bigger. Very strange .... and in my attempt to merge the other 2 partitions, I erased EVERYTHING. oops. So now I'm in recovery mode, downloading/installing Yosemite on the remaining 245 gig partition. I guess I'll just have an extra 5 gig partition laying around. Once that's done I'll update it to El Capitan, and then I'll pretty fairly close to what I had wanted.

Pretty sure what you encountered is a bug, one I've reported repeatedly.