partitioning

[m323]

hi folks

I bought a Mac Pro with OS 10.8 on it... some of my programs would not run right, so I loaded 10.6 Snow Leopard onto a 2nd partition which cut the 500GB disk in half.

Not using the 10.8 partition so I tried to erase it but it says, "cannot erase because it needs a newer OS to erase it"

so how can I erase the unused partition and reclaim the unused space on the disk?

 

[Studio K]

hi folks

so how can I erase the unused partition and reclaim the unused space on the disk?

Do you have an external Hard drive?

If so, then You could clone the 10.8 OS X partition to an external drive. Then boot from the external drive, launch Disk Utility and use it to wipe the unwanted 10.8 volume from your internal mac HDD.

To clone, use the Trial version of Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!

 

[NOTNlCE]

Create a 10.8 or 10.9 install DISC, like a DVD, and hold C to boot it up. Then boot from DVD and fix your problems that way. However, I don't know if your space will be as "recoverable" as you might think it is. I don't think you can merge partitions the way you can in Windows.

 

[Studio K]

Create a 10.8 or 10.9 install DISC, like a DVD, and hold C to boot it up. Then boot from DVD and fix your problems that way. However, I don't know if your space will be as "recoverable" as you might think it is. I don't think you can merge partitions the way you can in Windows.

I'm not certain that 10.8 will fit on a DVD. So an 8GB flash drive would be necessary for that solution.

Perhaps the OP could reclaim the space by using Disk Utility to 'Restore' his 10.6.8 volume from the second partition to the first.

 

[brand]

I'm not certain that 10.8 will fit on a DVD. So an 8GB flash drive would be necessary for that solution.

There is such a thing as dual layer DVDs.

 

[m323]

ok well in an effort to erase Lion, I deleted everything from that side of the partition. So I could not boot from there regardless.

... Unless Lion is an upgrade from Snow Leopard.. then I guess I could upgrade again to get Lion back?

I have an external drive and 64GB flash drive

another thing... my machine will not boot from 10.6 normally. I have to hold down Option and tell it to boot from there, even though thats the only OS on the system now.

I went into Preferences and tried to set "10.6" as the bootdisk but its doesnt seem to make a difference. It will not boot normally starting up.

will that "recovery" disk image do anything to help?

 

[Studio K]

ok well in an effort to erase Lion, I deleted everything from that side of the partition. So I could not boot from there regardless.

I have an external drive and 64GB flash drive

another thing... my machine will not boot from 10.6 normally. I have to hold down Option and tell it to boot from there, even though thats the only OS on the system now.

I went into Preferences and tried to set "10.6" as the bootdisk but its doesnt seem to make a difference. It will not boot normally starting up.

Since you have an external hard drive, then you could go ahead with cloning 10.6 to it. Then try to boot 10.6 from there (using the Option key/Apple boot menu method) and use Disk utility to reformat the entire internal hard drive into a single Mac OS extended journaled partition.
Then clone 10.6 back to the newly-formatted internal hard drive.

One more thing to do (since 10.6 isn't booting properly) would be to use disk utility (from the external clone) to Verify the internal hard drive and the OS X volume. If there are errors, then Repair them.

There is the possibility that you will be prevented from reformatting the internal drive using Snow Leopard disk utility because Lion was there. If this happens, then you will need 10.7, 10.8 or 10.9 to reformat your drive. You can Download the installer from the App Store.
NOTNICE's suggestion of creating an installation DVD would work fine. I didn't think about the dual-layer ones. The USB should also work for this.