Unable to delete partition

[dtrimble]

I have a 2 TB internal SSD in my Mac Pro 3,1 (early 2008). It's run on a PCIe controller. The drive is an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G.

The SSD had been split into two different partitions -- let's call them NEWSSD and OLDSSD. Space was split 50/50.

My objective:

1. Delete the OLDSSD partition

2. Move the space allocated to OLDSSD to NEWSSD, so there's a single partition using all 2 TB of the drivespace.

I have erased OLDSSD, and it is now empty. It is formatted as HFS+ -- OS X Extended (Journaled).

NEWSSD has data on it that I do not want to lose. It too is formatted as OS X Extended (Journaled).

In Disk Utility, the option to remove OLDSSD partition is grayed out. It is enabled for NEWSSD oddly enough.

I rebooted into Recovery Mode, hoping it would work from there. It is still grayed out there.

Disk Utility also gave me an odd error saying the volume OLDSSD is not journaled and thus cannot be resized. It stipulated to enable journaling under the File Menu. It actually is journaled. If I hit Cmd+I, the info panel for the partition clearly indicates it is journaled. It does the same for NEWSSD.

(Note that's at the partition-level. At the drive level, the info pane says it is not journaled, of course.)

Enable Journaling on the file menu appears to do nothing when I select it.

I tried mounting and unmounting both drive partitions. I'm getting no where.



How can I do this? I want to delete the old partition and resize its empty space into the other partition.


I'm running El Capitan.



dt

 

[jbarley]

Try downloading and using this patched version of Yosemite's Disk Utility, I find it far more user friendly then the newer versions.
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/files/file/480-disk-utility-patched-v2/

 

[dtrimble]

Try downloading and using this patched version of Yosemite's Disk Utility, I find it far more user friendly then the newer versions.
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/files/file/480-disk-utility-patched-v2/

Thanks for the pointer. I ended up learning that under macOS' native tools (both the GUI Disk Utility and the command line diskutil), you cannot resize the first partition in the hierarchy -- and the old partition was the first for me. So I used a 3rd party disk manager from Paragon Software, which handled it effortlessly. The difference for those who are curious is that Paragon's software can handle physically moving a partition on a desk. i.e., it can move the left and right borders of the partition in order to relocate it on a disk. In my case, that meant it could resize the partition by effectively moving the new partition to a physical location before the old one, and then removing the old partition and resizing the new one. Worked out great.

Next up I need to get Boot Camp running Windows 10 on my second internal drive, and then figure out why VMware Fusion won't let me run the Kali Linux virtual machine I ran just fine before having to rebuild this machine.

Thanks for the help.