Formatted partitioned disk, but the partition is still taking up space

I am new to the Mac forums community and this problem is my reason for joining.

I recently formatted my partitioned hard drive using Disk Utility, but I am still missing the space from the partition. While upgrading to Lion, there was some problem and the installation was blown.

I was left with a Macbook Pro paperweight, so I booted from a backup. From that backup, I opened disk utility and formatted my internal disk. It erased all the contents on the drive, and told me that I had one partition and 750 GB free. Sweet. That's what I want. But when I went to install Snow leopard on my internal disk, it tells me I had only 698 GB free.

The space I'm missing is exactly the amount of space I had allocated to my bootcamp partition. I formatted again, zeroed out the drive, and still wasn't having any luck. I realize now that I am supposed to use bootcamp utility to remove partitions, but that wasn't an option I had.

I have cleanly installed Lion onto my "invisibly partitioned" drive and have a time machine backup, so now I'm ready to reclaim my lost space. Bootcamp utility doesn't recognize a partition, nor does disk utility. In Finder, I see my disk and its capacity is shown to be "750 GB", but my free space is missing the 50 GB from my partition. I have found mention of similar problems in other forums, but nobody else has the unique problem of not seeing the partition in disk utility.

So how do I go about actually removing that partition and getting my lost space back?

waldenry said:

So how do I go about actually removing that partition and getting my lost space back?

Click to expand...

Can you post a screen cap from Disk Utility showing the partition mapping? It'll be easier to get a grasp of the situation from that.

Formatting won't remove the partition. You have to remove BOTH partitions, create one new partition (full disk), and then reformat.

Here is what I can see. I don't even see a partition anymore, but the space is shown to be taken up.

waldenry said:

Here is what I can see. I don't even see a partition anymore, but the space is shown to be taken up.

Click to expand...

Hmmmm. Well I learned something myself the other day when I was prepping a new 32 GB flash drive as a bootable emergency drive. I lost 5 GB space off the top. I've done this before and have never noticed it, but partitioning in GUID, which is required to boot OS X, does sacrifice some space up front as part of the partitioning scheme. It seems like an awful lot on my thumb drive though, and in your case, 50 GB seems like a ridiculous amount to lose up front. It may just be coincidence that it matches what your Boot Camp size was. There most certainly was no such partition on my thumb drive. Still, this "may" be normal. I'm curious to see more verification of this though. I'm just stunned that I've never even noticed it before, and the amount you are losing seems ridiculously high. I may experiment on this tonight with my 10.6 install discs… perhaps something has changed with the later updates to Snow Leopard in how it handles these partitions, or portrays them. That would explain why I've never noticed it before.

EDIT: I likely won't have time for this tonight. Do you have a Snow Leopard install disc that you can boot from? If so, try deleting that partition from there and re-create it to see if there's a difference.

I don't think GUID's going to suck up about 5% of total disk space though. I agree with booting off the other media and trying it again.

Stupid question, but you wouldn't have tried doing a partitioning scheme would you?

So when you specify how many partitions you want in the "current" drop box you select "1"?

-- Just double checking >.<"

Also, in addition to what the others have advised, before trying again to repartition and reinstall, do a PRAM reset. Stranger things have been cured by that simple procedure.

Thank you all for your quick responses. I tried the PRAM reset, and I found an extra 3 GB. I don't know why but I'm not complaining. I'm still missing the 50 GB though.

When I was formatting and screwing with Disk Utility, I tried to partition it as 1, then format it again. This didn't do anything though. My space is still not there.

When you say "boot off the other media," are you talking about booting from my Snow Leopard install disk? I do still have that, but how would I go about removing the partition? I can't see it in disk utility. Is there another way to do this in the OS X installer?

you can most certainly do disk utility from the snow leopard disk. Boot off the disk and the installer will ask which language you want to use as the main language.

click the right arrow key.


In the Apple menu bar, select ‘Disk Utilities’ from the Utilities menu.

Ok, this can also be done from Lion. I found this out because I tried to make a bootcamp partition with my now-700 GB Mac HD AND MY MAC PARTITION GOT ERASED!!!! "Oh, Lion will be great, it'll be so easy to upgrade to, look how easy we are making computers" ALL LIES!!! I've now watched my computer recover backups from time machine 3 times in 2 days. I've lost a paper and my class notes from the last two days along with iTunes purchases that I've requested to download again. Is anybody else having a horrible experience upgrading to Lion?

Ugh. Anyway, disk utility in the installer is the same as in OS X, right? I didn't notice a difference

^ Lol. *pat pat*?

I don't know what the deal is with Disk Utility, but I've seen it indicate some strange readings related to used/free space after partitioning and formatting that just were not correct.

I'd have to suggest at this point, quit looking at it, go ahead and install the OS.

(I just partitioned/formatted a 8GB flash drive and when done it said that over 5GB was used. However, I proceeded to copy the Lion installer to it without any issue. Going to reboot now to make sure it is bootable.)

(Yep, flash drive is good to go. In Lion now and DU is reporting accurate used/free space.)

bobtomay said:

I don't know what the deal is with Disk Utility, but I've seen it indicate some strange readings related to used/free space after partitioning and formatting that just were not correct.

I'd have to suggest at this point, quit looking at it, go ahead and install the OS.

(I just partitioned/formatted a 8GB flash drive and when done it said that over 5GB was used. However, I proceeded to copy the Lion installer to it without any issue. Going to reboot now to make sure it is bootable.)

(Yep, flash drive is good to go. In Lion now and DU is reporting accurate used/free space.)

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I went ahead and restored a 7+ GB disk image to an 8 GB partition on my flash drive that Disk Utility claimed only had 3 GB of free space, and it took it all. That is just bizarre how Disk Utility thinks so much space is used up, but ignoring it definitely works.

One would think the problems with Disk Utility would be fixed with the release of Lion. Whatever, it is what it is. As for my vanishing 50 GB I have found a fix: I partitioned my drive with bootcamp (again), installed Windows 7 (this was a waste of time because I wound up deleting it anyway), restarted in Windows just to see, saw the OS was missing, went back to OS X and through bootcamp removed the partition. It must also have removed my original windows partition that was taking up my 50 GB, so now I'm back to normal.

In summary: using bootcamp to partition again, then removing the partition via bootcamp fixes the problem of disappearing space.

Now I would like to bootcamp again, but I want it to be stable. I have a disk image from when I restored my system last, but when I partition and install windows I find that my computer is "Missing OS". Any ideas on how to set up bootcamp from a disk image?

waldenry said:

In summary: using bootcamp to partition again, then removing the partition via bootcamp fixes the problem of disappearing space.

Click to expand...

Ahhhhh yes, I believe this is a known issue. Which is why you're supposed to remove it in bootcamp rather than disk utility

It might help if you:

Explain how you're "installing" windows and from what.

and

Where did this disk image come from. i.e. what app did you use to create the windows image and what are it's directions for restoring?

Here's what I've been doing:

1) Partitioning with Bootcamp Assistant

2) Inserting the Windows 7 Ultimate install disk when prompted by Bootcamp Assistant

3) Following the install directions for Windows 7 until it gives the option to "Restore system from disk image"

4) I choose to restore from a disk image, then select the image from an external drive I saved the image to originally.

I believe I used the native Windows application to create the image. It works fine in the beginning. I run Windows update, restart and let it install all the updates, then I shutdown windows. It's goofy when I'm in Windows though because even though I dedicate 50 GB to the Windows partition, it still thinks it's on the old partition (size 25 GB). I went to boot windows a while later to do a Matlab project, and I get a black screen that says: "Missing OS".

HELP!!! Ok, so I got Lion working and my computer recognizing my hard drive's full capacity, but I just restarted and got an image of a folder with a question mark instead of the apple that shows up when you boot. What is going on?!?

waldenry said:

HELP!!! Ok, so I got Lion working and my computer recognizing my hard drive's full capacity, but I just restarted and got an image of a folder with a question mark instead of the apple that shows up when you boot. What is going on?!?

Click to expand...

You have done so many convoluted things with your drive that's there's just no telling what has happened at this point. First off, you need to get past thinking that your hard drive had any space taken up. Disk Utility was wrong about that. Why it was wrong is irrelevant. It has little or nothing to do with Boot Camp, as judging from my experience with a flash drive. So just get past it.

You should try booting from the Recovery Partition that Lion installs and run some tests on your volume.
Lion: Diving into your Recovery partition | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Failing that, you can try reinstalling from scratch, though to be honest, you may have a hardware failure of some sort. It could be the drive, it could be the motherboard. Try running the Apple Hardware Test also.
The Apple Hardware Test