I formated a external USB drive to mount with 10 different volumes. (Actually I forgot how i made this work)
The drive will not show as being partitioned in drive utility in OSX but show all volumes(MBR) on this drive as kind of individual ones which are not related like partitions are.
With diskutil in terminal I was able to delete the unnecessary volumes. But now I have a 2TB drive with only two volumes left, which share 400GB together. So the unallocated space is missing and I do not know how to reallocate it either asigning it to one of the volumes or by creating a new volume which takes all unalloacted space. Does anybody know what to do?
I would realy want to avoid erasing the whole disk, as the two volumes keep backups of different machines.
Disk
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk2
1: Apple_HFS Name1 200.2 GB disk2s1
2: Apple_HFS Name2 200.2 GB disk2s5
sudo gpt -r show disk2
start size index contents
0 1 MBR
1 390965066
390965067 390965064 1 MBR part 175
781930131 2345790390 2 MBR part 5
3127720521 779308647
Is there any way to keep the two left volumes and allocate the free space?
Best, hirschferkel
Disk: /dev/disk2 geometry: 243201/255/63 [3907029168 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending
#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: AF 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 390965067 - 390965064] HFS+
2: 05 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 781930131 - 2345790390] Extended DOS
3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending
#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: AF 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [2736755457 - 390965064] HFS+
2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
Best Answer
The procedure posted in this answer relies on the use of the command
gdisk
. The command is not included with macOS. Included is the procedure for installing this command.Install gdisk
Downloads
folder.Execute the command given below to remove the quarantine.
Use the Finder application to install
gdisk
.Convert a MBR Partition Table to a GUID Partition Table (GPT).
Use command given below to determine the identifier for the drive. I will assume this is
disk2
, as shown in your question.Execute the following commands to perform the conversion.
Below is an example.
Eject the drive by executing the command given below.
Unplug the drive and plug back in. Execute the command below to see if the drive identifier has changed.
Add an EFI Partition
Create the partition. Selecting a partition type of Linux prevents the partition from mounting before being formatted.
Below is an example.
Eject the drive by executing the command given below.
Unplug the drive and plug back in. Execute the command below to see if the drive identifier has changed.
FAT32 format the partition.
Below is an example.
Change the partition type to EFI.
Below is an example.
Add a New Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Volume
The free space before the original two volumes can not be added to either of these volumes. To reclaim this space, one or more new volumes need to be created. The procedure below creates one new volume.
Create the partition. Selecting a partition type of Linux prevents the partition from mounting before being formatted.
Below is an example.
Eject the drive by executing the command given below.
Unplug the drive and plug back in. Execute the command below to see if the drive identifier has changed.
Format the partition Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This will also change the partition type to the correct value.
Below is an example.
Reclaim the Remaining Free Space
Add the remaining free space to the existing Volumes. Any free space that is remaining after entering these commands should be fairly small and is required to be reserved for use by macOS.
Below is an example.
Appendix
Descriptions for the
gdisk
commands is given below.