running out of space/divided hard drive

[evj]

my older 08 imac is running out of space. last year tech divided my hard drive thus taking away space; is there any way to undo that hard drive split w/o losing everything?

so far seems like best option is to buy a new or used imac, but would rather not if i don't have to.

 

[Meister]

Why was the hd divided?
How did you lose space?

 

[DeltaMac]

hmm...
What is the reason that the tech re-partitioned your hard drive?
Can you go back to that shop?

You may be able to remove that 2nd partition yourself by using your Disk Utility/partition tab. Before you do that, you do want to make sure you won't lose anything, by checking that your backup is complete (you DO have a backup, right?)

 

[Weaselboy]

my older 08 imac is running out of space. last year tech divided my hard drive thus taking away space; is there any way to undo that hard drive split w/o losing everything?

so far seems like best option is to buy a new or used imac, but would rather not if i don't have to.

Yes... it is fairly easy to undo it.

Run each of the two commands below in Terminal then tell us the output of each and we should be able to help you.

diskutil list

diskutil cs list

 

[evj]

Why was the hd divided?
i had just my imac repaired but it was still running very slow. still having problems. So had a highly recommended second tech person. He suggested partitioning the hard drive, to test from, but he left me hanging, lost a lot of my work in the process & left it that way.

How did you lose space?
the other portion of the hard drive that i normally use is reaching maximum use. I've removed some excess raw photo files, but running out of space again.
it was doing better, but i just couldn't spend any more money on it, now about a year & a half later it's running out of space.

Thank-you for your reply

 

[maflynn]

so far seems like best option is to buy a new or used imac, but would rather not if i don't have to.

Buy an external drive and offload some of your data to that drive.

Reading between the lines, I'd say you don't (or at least didn't) have a backup plan in place. I recommend two external drives, one for backing up your system and one to hold your data. Since you lost a lot of your work when a tech worked on your computer I'm assuming you may not have a backup

 

[Fishrrman]

Maflyn is correct.
OP -- the very first thing you need to do is learn something about "backing up".
Get an external USB drive.
Get either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper. Both are free to download and use for 30 days.
Either one will create a bootable backup of your boot partition.

If you have TWO partitions, each with data on it, you can partition the backup drive as well, and use CCC or SD to create backups of each.

Once you have bootable backups in place, you can do this:
1. boot from the backup drive
2. re-initialize (erase) the internal drive back to one partition
3. Use CCC to "re-clone" the bootable backup BACK TO the internal drive.
4. Then, carefully "move stuff over" from the second backup to the internal drive.

This isn't all that difficult.
If I can do it, you can, too.

 

[Bart Kela]

I'm sorry to say this, but it sounds like you aren't very good at picking technicians. Both of them should have asked you if you made recent backups before they started their work. Both apparently bungled your system.

Find someone else to identify a qualified and professional technician, something you are apparently unable to do. The first thing that technician should do is make a full backup of your system and then set up a regular backup strategy for your computer. If they don't recommend that, then keep looking for a technician who values your data integrity.

I suggest you do not try any of the Do-It-Yourself fixes posted by others here. There is no evidence that you have the basic system administration skills to successfully accomplish these tasks based on the fact that you don't even have a decent backup.