Mavericks is Great! Now Want to Remove Snow Leopard Partition.

I installed Mavericks as a partition on my 2011 Macbook Pro to see how it ran. So far so good, and all original work has been saved to my external hard drive.

I now want to remove the original partition (start-up disk?) to free-up hard drive space for Mavericks. Disk Utility does not permit this. Is there any work-around to save me re-installing Mavericks from scratch? Thanks.

?? "Have not tried deleting the first partition and resizing a second partition. You might try it by booting to the original SL or a Mavericks USB installer and deleting the SL partition, then attempting to drag the second partition up to take in that space.

This is a bad idea with a mechanical drive. I would never do this and have to recommend you not do it either. Why?

Because, you want the OS that will be your primary OS installed at the beginning of the drive - not in the middle or toward the end of the drive.
You've already lost some speed by not having the system files at the beginning of the system drive/partition.

bobtomay said:

?? ....................
Because, you want the OS that will be your primary OS installed at the beginning of the drive - not in the middle or toward the end of the drive.
You've already lost some speed by not having the system files at the beginning of the system drive/partition.

Click to expand...

This is very very true. Also one should never attempt to adjust partition sizes unless they are fully confident and have done this many times. Plus never attempt unless you have a full backup.

One reason adjusting partition sizes is bad. If you make the partition you have your system on accidentally smaller, you run the risk of loosing some if not all your data on that drive. So just FYI..

?? "Have not tried deleting the first partition and resizing a second partition. You might try it by booting to the original SL or a Mavericks USB installer and deleting the SL partition, then attempting to drag the second partition up to take in that space.

Click to expand...

OS X will not allow resizing the second partition to fill in after the first is removed. You can only resize down not up. (If that makes sense.) There is a utility that will work but it's not inexpensive to buy: iPartition $46.95

He will have to wipe the disk, create one partition, reinstall Mavericks, or leave things the way they are.

As a satisfactory solution I used the new Mavericks' Time Machine backup on my external hard drive (cmd R) to overwrite my internal, factory-supplied 'Macintosh HD' (took 30 minutes).

Then deleted the 2nd (lower) new Mavericks partition and dragged the original partition down to full size. Pretty easy, once you've done it, and no thanks to Apple's database which doesn't want users messing around trialling Mavericks on a separate partition. Also repaired disk permissions which were out. The procedure added a few icons to the dock but otherwise preserved everything I'd set up in Mavericks. No third-party software needed.

A slightly better way to have done it would have been to boot from a USB stick or external drive, repartition the drive to one partition (losing everything on it in the process) and then using TM to restore everything as you did. That way you don't have to face the prospect of resizing the partition on the fly AFTER a lengthy install/restore process.

Glad it all worked out for you.