Lost 80 GB After Removing Bootcamp Partition

[ogpikachu3]

Dear MacRumors,

I recently updated to 10.14 and a few days ago I lost 80GB of my mac hard drive after trying to remove the windows bootcamp partition from my computer. Any suggestions too recover said space would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Cheers

 

[tyc0746]

How did you ‘remove the Bootcamp partition’?

Did you use Bootcamp Assistant, or did you just delete the partition via Disk Utility (and not reassign the space)?

 

[Fishrrman]

The following procedure will remove that BootCamp partition, 100% guaranteed:

1. Get either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper. Both are free to download and use for 30 days (doing this will cost you nothing)
2. Get an external drive (if your internal drive is 250gb, the external should be that size or larger)
3. Use CCC or SD to clone the contents of your Mac partition (the regular partition you boot into and work from) to the external drive
4. Now, BOOT FROM the external drive (press the power on button, IMMEDIATELY hold down the "option" key CONTINUOUSLY until the startup manager appears, then select the cloned drive and hit return).
5. When you get booted from the external drive, open Disk Utility
6. In the upper-left-hand-corner of Disk Utility, choose "show all devices"
7. Now, click the uppermost line for your internal drive (this represents the physical drive itself).
8. Next, click the "erase" button and ERASE the internal drive, completely. You would choose APFS, GUID partition format
9. Once the drive is erased, quit Disk Utility and re-open CCC (or SD).
10. Now, RE-clone the contents of the cloned backup BACK TO the internal drive.
11. When done, disconnect the external cloned backup and reboot to the internal drive.
12. Done.

In the future, don't bother fooling with BootCamp again.
I'd suggest either VMWare Fusion or Parallels (both "virtual machines") as "the better way to go..."

 

[tyc0746]

Sounds like a long-winded way of recovering that missing 80gb if the correct Bootcamp Assistant ‘remove Windows’ method takes about 2 minutes.

Step 1: Back up any needed data stored on the Windows 10 partition.
Too late, you’ve already deleted this partition.

Step 2: Launch Boot Camp Assistant, which is found in the Utilities folder under Applications in Finder.

Step 3: Click Continue.

Step 4: Click Restore to remove the Windows partition and restore the disk to a single-partition volume for macOS. The restore process, depending on the size of the partition and drive, may take a few minutes.

Step 5: Click Quit once the restore process is complete. You can now confirm via Disk Utility that the Boot Camp partition has been removed.

————

BTW, in my experience running Windows under a virtual machine means you lose about 50% of the performance using Fusion or Parallels versus Bootcamp, and don’t get full graphics speed...I run both Bootcamp (when I know I’ll be on Windows all day) or via Fusion when I’ve just got a quick Windows piece to fix in between Mac work.

 

[ogpikachu3]

The following procedure will remove that BootCamp partition, 100% guaranteed:

1. Get either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper. Both are free to download and use for 30 days (doing this will cost you nothing)
2. Get an external drive (if your internal drive is 250gb, the external should be that size or larger)
3. Use CCC or SD to clone the contents of your Mac partition (the regular partition you boot into and work from) to the external drive
4. Now, BOOT FROM the external drive (press the power on button, IMMEDIATELY hold down the "option" key CONTINUOUSLY until the startup manager appears, then select the cloned drive and hit return).
5. When you get booted from the external drive, open Disk Utility
6. In the upper-left-hand-corner of Disk Utility, choose "show all devices"
7. Now, click the uppermost line for your internal drive (this represents the physical drive itself).
8. Next, click the "erase" button and ERASE the internal drive, completely. You would choose APFS, GUID partition format
9. Once the drive is erased, quit Disk Utility and re-open CCC (or SD).
10. Now, RE-clone the contents of the cloned backup BACK TO the internal drive.
11. When done, disconnect the external cloned backup and reboot to the internal drive.
12. Done.

In the future, don't bother fooling with BootCamp again.
I'd suggest either VMWare Fusion or Parallels (both "virtual machines") as "the better way to go..."

Skipped the CCC/SD part, but followed the rest via time machine. Works perfectly. Thank you so much.