Resizing partition seems to have resized disk

[mashersaurus]

Hi all

I’ve got a 4TB hard drive in my late 2011 iMac. There is just one 4TB partition on the disk. I wanted to resize the partition to 3TB to make space for a 16GB partition, and one more partition to fill the remaining space. I left the resize operation going overnight, and when I came back, Disk Utility had completely frozen on “Copying booter”. I had no choice but to force the system to power off. It started back up, and I relaunched disk utility. Now I find that the 3TB partition is taking up the whole of the available space on the disk. I cannot create another partition in the remaining 1TB of space, and I cannot expand the 3TB partition back to 4TB. If I select the device on the side bar in disk utility, it show it as 4TB. But it won’t allow me to use all 4TB.

I booted down to a macOS installer and ran disk utility from there. It said it had found corruption, and that a to repair the startup volume I should run first aid from Recovery. I booted down to recovery by holding Command-Option-R, re-ran first aid, and got the same message. It wouldn’t offer to repair the corruption.

I’m not sure what my options are here. The disk is accessible and macOS will boot. I’m waiting on delivery of a new USB HDD to back up my files* and then I can format and reinstall if necessary, but I’d rather not do this unless absolutely necessary,

And advice would be gratefully received!


*I do have a time machine backup, but don’t want to use it unless as a last resort. I’d prefer to restore directly from a USB drive.

 

[HDFan]

Disk utility has some severe restrictions. I often turn to Paragon Hard Disk Manager when Disk Utility won't do the job. They have a 10 day free trial:

https://www.paragon-software.com/home/hdm-mac/

 

[mashersaurus]

Disk utility has some severe restrictions. I often turn to Paragon Hard Disk Manager when Disk Utility won't do the job. They have a 10 day free trial:

https://www.paragon-software.com/home/hdm-mac/

Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll give this a try when I get home!

 

[Fishrrman]

Sometimes "doing it the long way"... is the only way... that works...

 

[mashersaurus]

Ok, I have just installed Paragon Hard Disk Manager and the problem seems to be that although the disk itself, and the "Core Storage Physical Volume" are being reported as 4TB, the "Core Storage Logical Volume" is only 3TB. There doesn't seem to be any option to resize the logical volume, unless I'm missing something.

 

[HDFan]

I’m waiting on delivery of a new USB HDD to back up my files* and then I can format and reinstall if necessary,

If you don't have a full backup I would stop right now. Should have caught that earlier. Never do any major disk modifications without having a full backup. If something goes wrong (power goes out, program errors) you risk losing everything.

I am unfamiliar with Core Storage. There are articles about how to delete/resize core storage partitions, but I wouldn't do anything until you have a full, verified backup. 2 backups would be better. Simplest thing then would be to clone your original disk to the backup using something like Carbon Copy Cloner. Boot from that cloned disk, then wipe the internal disk, then restore from the clone.

 

[mashersaurus]

@HDFan
It’s ok, as I said in an earlier post, I have a full time capsule backup. I would just prefer to do a full drag-and-drop home directory backup and restore from that, and use the time capsule as a last resort. My USB drive has arrived now and I kicked off a backup before leaving for work, so I’ll be able to format and reinstall when I get home tonight.

 

[HDFan]

I have a full time capsule backup

Glad you're not dependent on a TC backup. They can be unreliable.

 

[mashersaurus]

Glad you're not dependent on a TC backup. They can be unreliable.

Yeah, they feel very fragmented being split across all the disk images, and I've had trouble restoring individual files on previous occasions. It's a last resort really. I would always prefer a drag-and-drop backup.