Can't repartition after removing rEFIt

[tron_thomas]

I have a late 2008 MacBook Pro with a 320 Gigabyte hard drive. When I originally got the system I had use the rEFIt boot loader so I could triple boot between Mac OS X 10.6, Fedora Linux 12, and Windows 7 (all 64-bit operating systems). I divided the hard disk evenly between the three systems.

It has been a while, so I don’t remember exactly what happened, however I believe that at some point I wanted to upgrade my version of Fedora, and the installation program would not boot properly on my machine or something, and somehow my installation of Fedora got messed up, and I never used it again.

Later I upgraded Mac OS X to 10.7. I don’t know if that upgrade screwed something up, however after that I was not able to boot successfully into Windows any more. I think it would get to the Starting Windows screen and then some error would happen.

I continued to just use the system only running Mac OS X (I’m currently running OS X 10.10) and everything had been fine, only now I find that I am running a little low on disk space, and I would like to reclaim what I had allocated for the other operating systems.

I watched a video on how to remove rEFIt and redo my system to one partition. I have successfully removed rEFIt, only I have been unable to regain the partition space. The video I watch showed using Disk Utility to delete the partitions for Linux and Windows and then recombine everything to one partition.

When I went to use Disk Utility, I found that instead of three partitions, I only had two. My first partition seemed to be a combination of the Macintosh and Linux partitions, only it was still just using the space I originally allocated just for Mac OS X. The second partition was Windows.

I successfully deleted the Windows partition, only when I now go to try and create the single partition, the process fails with this output from Disk Utility:

Partition failed

Partition failed with the error:

Couldn’t modify partition map because file system verification failed

What can be done that would allow me so my system has a single partition that uses all available disk space?

 

[Lifeisabeach]

I would clone your Mac partition to an external backup (which you should have done anyway prior to partitioning, unless you like to live dangerously). Then boot from that backup; use Disk Utility to wipe all partitions off the internal drive; re-create a single one; then clone the external drive back to the internal drive. SuperDuper is a cloning tool that is great for this.

 

[tron_thomas]

I fixed the problem.

I did a verify from Disk Utility on the Macintosh partition. It said the disk needed to be repaired, and I need to boot to the recovery partition.

I rebooted the system and held down Command+R to boot of the recovery partition. I successfully performed the repair.

I rebooted back into OS X, ran Disk Utility again, and was able to create the single partition.

 

[Rod]

Well done, I had exactly the same problem with an Ubuntu partition. Thanks for reminding me. I will make a note of your "Fix" for future reference and have added a point to your reputation.;D