Willg89 Posted December 5, 2009 Share Posted December 5, 2009 Hi there, As the title suggests, I'm having trouble with disk utility. I've got 10GB free space on my hard drive which has Vista installed on it. (see picture below) Up until yesterday I had OSX 10.5.1 installed on a 10GB partition of my HDD, everything was great. Then whilst trying to upgrade to 10.5.5 i made a mistake and bricked it. Unfortunately, rather than merely re-installing 10.5.1 on the partition, I deleted the partition back into free space, thinking I'd just re-format it from my install disk. With the wonderful thing that is hindsight, I realise that this was unnecessary! However, the free space doesn't show up on the left hand side of Disk Utility when I run it from the install disk. Oddly, it DOES show up on the 'partition' menu as 10GB free space, but I can't do anything with it - all the options are greyed out. In Vista, I've tried formatting the free space and then deleting it again (which made no difference), and extending my Vista volume with the free space (didn't even work). Can anyone give me a hand? Thanks! P.s. - I know the obvious solution is to back up my vista disk, delete that volume and merge all the free space into one, then re-install from there. If possible I'd quite like to avoid doing this! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/200955-free-space-doesnt-show-up-in-disk-utility/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
srs5694 Posted December 5, 2009 Share Posted December 5, 2009 Try using another utility to create a partition, then leave that partition in place and, if necessary, reformat the partition in Disk Utility. I've heard that FAT partitions work well for this purpose, but I've not experimented extensively, so you may need to experiment a bit yourself. Personally, I'd use Linux utilities (fdisk and mkfs.hfsplus) to create an HFS+ partition directly; then Disk Utility won't be necessary. If you try this, the partition should be of type 0xAF. Some Linux emergency CDs have the necessary tools. At least one of System Rescue CD or Parted Magic has the necessary tools, but I'm not sure if both do. (The mkfs.hfsplus utility is the one that might be rare.) Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/200955-free-space-doesnt-show-up-in-disk-utility/#findComment-1351462 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Willg89 Posted December 6, 2009 Author Share Posted December 6, 2009 Rod, In the end I managed to sort it out by making the space into a FAT32 partition in Vista, which finally showed up in disk utility, and then erasing and re-formatting. Thanks very much for your help. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/200955-free-space-doesnt-show-up-in-disk-utility/#findComment-1352561 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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