Disk Utility unable to delete partition on OS X El Capitan

My Mac hard drive is divided into 3 partitions having OS X El Capitan, Yosemite and Mavericks. I want to keep El Capitan and Yosemite and remove Mavericks, however Disk Utility on El Capitan won’t let me do it. I suspect that if I do it from Yosemite than Disk Utility won’t resize the available free spaces to either partition. I don’t wont the Mac to loose drive spaces. What are my alternatives to deleted and resize partition on OS X El Capitan?

michaelsmith said:

My Mac hard drive is divided into 3 partitions having OS X El Capitan, Yosemite and Mavericks. I want to keep El Capitan and Yosemite and remove Mavericks, however Disk Utility on El Capitan won’t let me do it. I suspect that if I do it from Yosemite than Disk Utility won’t resize the available free spaces to either partition. I don’t wont the Mac to lose drive spaces. What are my alternatives to deleted and resize partition on OS X El Capitan?

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You might get a response over at the Mac Talk section.

Resizing partitions used to be a bit of a dark art in PC Land, and you would need to be careful, particularly with Mac. I've never had a need to partition a drive, except in the old days when maximum partition size was 32Mb.

Do you really need to remove the partition? Could you just delete the files and use it as a data drive?

I would back everything up on to another drive using Carbon Copy Cloner or some such. If you don't have another drive for backup, you should. I would then reformat the main hard drive appropriately and restore what I wanted to keep.

Have found Disk Utility in El Cap frustratingly weak. Luckily I've got Linux in another partition and the disk utilities are much more capable (and dangerous). Linux is definitely my choice for partition work (on my iMac's internal and external drives) and I've never had a problem losing data.

If you don't wish to go the Linux route, you could delete the Mavericks partition from Yosemite's Disk Utility (if it'll let you) then expand your El Cap partition into the resulting free space, if it happens to be next to it. If your Yosemite partition is between El Cap and the free space then as WryCuda suggested, format the free space and use it for data. You could also use it to install Linux. ;-)

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rb0321 said:

Have found Disk Utility in El Cap frustratingly weak. Luckily I've got Linux in another partition and the disk utilities are much more capable (and dangerous). Linux is definitely my choice for partition work (on my iMac's internal and external drives) and I've never had a problem losing data.

If you don't wish to go the Linux route, you could delete the Mavericks partition from Yosemite's Disk Utility (if it'll let you) then expand your El Cap partition into the resulting free space, if it happens to be next to it. If your Yosemite partition is between El Cap and the free space then as WryCuda suggested, format the free space and use it for data. You could also use it to install Linux. ;-)

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www.flickr.com/photos/rb00321/

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This experience doesn't directly relate to your issue, but perhaps it might give you an idea.

I use an external SSD as a boot disk running El Cap. As the Disk Utility in El Cap is crippled, I kept my copy of Yosemite on the internal disk, basically just for this purpose. I needed to be able to use Disk Utility on my two RAID disks.

In this usage it works just fine on all disks.

I seem to recall that when doing the setup with the different operating systems I tried to put, El Cap, Yosemite, and also Windows on the internal drive and it wouldn't allow me to do so. I decided at the time that it just didn't want to accommodate more than two operating systems and I didn't investigate further.

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http://www.nightstreets.com
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"Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named...but a dying culture invariable exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners is more significant than a riot."
This symptom is especially serious in that an individual displaying it never thinks of it as a sign of ill health but as proof of his/her strength. ...Friday, it is too late to save this culture--this worldwide culture... Therefore we must now prepare the monasteries for the coming Dark Age. Electronic records are too fragile..."
--Robert A. Heinlein in "Friday"

One idea is, have any of these partitions been encrypted with FileVault? I think that can prevent re-partitioning.

In general, there are some recent confusing changes to how OS X disks work, related to the relatively new CoreStorage concept. It's what makes some things like the Fusion Drive work, but it doesn't seem fully integrated with Disk Utility yet. In fixing some volume issues, it's been helpful to learn some of the CoreStorage commands in Terminal, even though Mac users shouldn't have to resort to such things.

These might help:

you actually can use command line tool to do that.

login to terminal and type in "diskutil".

Hi Michael,

Your only option is to install a 3rd party Mac hard drive manager. You will be needing a software that can create bootable usb for your hard drive. Through the USB it will allow you to safely remove mavericks partition and resize the free spaces either to Macintosh HD (El Capitan) or Yosemite disk. My Recommendation is Stellar Partition Manager which is 10.11 supported.