MacOS – Disk Utility can’t find free space and Recovery Mode can’t resize

disk-utilityhard drivemacmacospartition

I had Linux installed on my Macbook in dual boot with MacOS.

Today, I uninstalled Linux, so I erased the partitions on which it was installed from Internet Recovery Mode. But, now, when I want to resize my Mac partition to its original size (250GB) ( now it is 200GB, Linux had 50GB in total) one of these 2 things will happen:

  1. If I try to resize it from inside the OS, in Disk Utility, it won't find any free space. It will show that I have 200GB available (my current partition) which is not true.
  2. In Recovery Mode, I am able to see the free space of 50GB but I can't add it to my current partition, nor can I format it as another partition. It would get stuck on "Preparing to partition disk".

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disk0s2 is the Recovery partition. Don't ask me why it's name is FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF.

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Please, tell me that the solution is not to re-install/format everything. Thanks!

Edit:
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Best Answer

Your EFI is missing in the partition table - the content should be still there though - and the Recovery HD's partition has the wrong type.

To salvage this you just have to rewrite the GUID partition table:

  • Boot to Internet Recovery Mode
  • Open Terminal in the menubar > Utilities > Terminal
  • Enter diskutil list and with the disk identifier of the internal disk found there: gpt -r show diskX. Usually it's disk0 - below I assume it's disk0. Use the disk identifier you have found in your environment in the commands below!

  • Unmount the internal disk:

    diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0

  • Remove all partitions:

    gpt remove -i 1 /dev/disk0 
gpt remove -i 2 /dev/disk0

  • Re-add all partitions:

    gpt add -b 40 -i 1 -s 409600 -t C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B /dev/disk0
gpt add -b 391759648 -i 3 -s 1269536 -t 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk0
gpt add -b 409640 -i 2 -s 391350008 -t 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk0

  • Verify disk and main volume and repair it if necessary:

    diskutil verifyDisk /dev/disk0
diskutil verifyVolume /dev/disk0s2

  • Resize the main volume:

    diskutil resizeVolume /dev/disk0s2 100% #or 250g
  • Reboot to your main volume
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