Joining partitions in OS X

Eager to take on new challenges, preferebly with live equipment, I decided to reclaim some disk space.

My Ubuntu install on my MacBookPro was sitting there unused for a while now. And with VM’s who needs to dual boot anyway?

So, let’s trash my Ubuntu install. Now joining my ‘windows’ disk to my active partition was a piece of cake. However the linux swap would not budge.

Ofcourse booting from another disk was a solution which is by me considered as a failure not a solution.

Simple solution in the end:

box:~ user$ diskutil list /dev/disk0

/dev/disk0
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *320.1 GB   disk0
1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
2:                  Apple_HFS Inlakesh                309.2 GB   disk0s2
3:                 Linux Swap                         4.1 GB     disk0s3

box:~ user$ diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ oldswap disk0s3

Started erase on disk0s3
Unmounting disk
Erasing
Initialized /dev/rdisk0s3 as a 4 GB HFS Plus volume
Mounting disk
Finished erase on disk0s3 oldswap

box:~ user$ diskutil list /dev/disk0

/dev/disk0
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *320.1 GB   disk0
1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
2:                  Apple_HFS Inlakesh                309.2 GB   disk0s2
3:                  Apple_HFS oldswap                 4.1 GB     disk0s3

box:~ user$ diskutil mergePartitions HFS+ Inlakesh disk0s2 disk0s3

Merging partitions into a new partition
Start partition: disk0s2 Inlakesh
Finish partition: disk0s3 oldswap
Started partitioning on disk0
Merging partitions
Waiting for disks to reappear
Growing disk
Finished partitioning on disk0
/dev/disk0
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *320.1 GB   disk0
1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
2:                  Apple_HFS Inlakesh                319.7 GB   disk0s2

That’s it. Scrapping the uneeded partition (volume in apple diskutil speak) to something diskutil understands, i.e. HFS+, worked like a charm!

Enjoy.