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Background: I got a new computer recently, a new MacBook Pro running High Sierra. My old computer was a 2011 MacBook Pro, and I used an external drive to back it up with Time Machine. The drive has two partitions, both Mac X Extended (Journaled), and one contains my backups (Mac Daddy) while the other is empty (007). I no longer need two partitions on the drive, and would like to merge them without losing my backups.

Problem: Disk Utility is being less than helpful, as you can see it won't give me an option to do any partitioning on them, and in fact it doesn't even recognize the two partitions as part of the same drive in the sidebar, though under "Device" info it does say they are both "disk2". I've already erased 007 and run First Aid on both just in case, but nothing changed. I imagine I may have to use Terminal, but I don't know how. Any help would be appreciated!

P.S. I know this is similar to other questions, especially this one which never got solved, but I figured I'd redo it with my specific info.

Thanks!

Results of "diskutil list":

/dev/disk0 (internal):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                         500.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     314.6 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         500.0 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +500.0 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            57.7 GB    disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 20.4 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                509.8 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      2.1 GB     disk1s4

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk2
   1:                  Apple_HFS MAC DADDY               1.5 TB     disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS 007                     499.9 GB   disk2s2

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    You should be able to use the Disk Utility application. If you want to use the command line, then post the output from the command diskutil list. You can edit your question and paste the output as text. Do not worry about the format, I can fix the formatting. Commented Feb 28, 2018 at 5:52
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    There you go David. I'd be happy to use the utility, but I don't see how as it won't give me the option to partition. Commented Feb 28, 2018 at 13:57

2 Answers 2

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If you mouse over the grayed out partition button, you see the message "Disks with Master Boot Record partition maps can not be partitioned." Of course, this only applies to the Disk Utility application. The Terminal application command that you need to enter is given below.

diskutil  mergepartitions  free  none  disk2s1  disk2s2

This command will remove 007 and add the space to MY DADDY. The existing files stored in MY DADDY will be preserved.

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  • Perfect! Not only did that work, it did so very quickly. Much appreciated David. Commented Feb 28, 2018 at 16:53
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If you select the View and Show all Devices you should then be able to select the Physical Disk.

This will let you select the Partition and delete the unwanted partition.

The linked question is different because the drive is partitioned using MBR and recent versions of macOS refuse to manage these for reasons known only to Apple (even though this was previously possible).

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    Ah thank you, I added a picture with that view. However "Partition" is still greyed out, and I see no way to delete the unused partition. Commented Feb 28, 2018 at 14:03
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    A good indicator that the external drive was using a MBR partition map would be that disk2s1 was not an EFI partition. Commented Feb 28, 2018 at 14:51

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