hard-drive – Solution for 50GB of Missing Disk Space and Partition Issues

disk-spacehard drivepartition

On a 120GB SSD hard drive in a MacBook only 70GB are available. The missing 50GB are not even shown as free space.

Here is what the output of Disk Utility looks like:

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As you can see on the first screenshot the disk has 120GB. However, the partition chart on the same screenshot only shows 70GB. Also the other two screenshots show that only 70GB out of 120GB seem to be available.

The command diskutil list shows that the physical disk0 is 120GB big, but the synthesized disk1 only 70GB:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         70.0 GB    disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +70.0 GB    disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            60.2 GB    disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 21.7 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                509.9 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      2.1 GB     disk1s4

Best Answer

You previously installed Windows (or another OS) and deleted it afterwards - except an orphaned Apple_BOOT or 2nd EFI partition (disk0s3 - 134.2 MB).

The 50 GB are simply unallocated disk space.

To expand your APFS container you have to remove the third partition and resize the container:

First convert the third partition to free space:

sudo diskutil eraseVolume "Free Space" %noformat% /dev/disk0s3

Then expand your APFS container to the max (0 is a magic size here):

diskutil apfs resizeContainer disk0s2 0
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