how to unpartition an external hard drive mac

Here’s how to remove a volume from a container. Select the partition you want to remove.Īs we said, recent Macs have APFS-formatted drives and use containers instead of partitions.Select your boot drive in the sidebar (it’s probably called Macintosh HD).Click Erase, then Erase again to confirm.Choose the volume you created when you originally partitioned your drive.Now, back up your Mac and you’ll be ready to wipe and remove the partition. This module scans your Mac for files you don’t need, potential malware threats, and opportunities to speed up your Mac. The quickest and easiest way to do that is to use CleanMyMac X’s Smart Scan. However, there’s no point backing up junk files and other data you don’t need, so you should get rid of that first. You can use Time Machine or any other disk backup utility. The first thing you should do before you unpartition your Mac is back up the partition you want to remove. How to delete a hard drive partition on your Mac

Click Add, then press Done when it’s finished.Then, press the ‘+’ Add Volume button in the toolbar.Click on a volume, such as Macintosh HD, in the sidebar.Go to Applications > Utilities and launch Disk Utility.How to create a volume on an APFS container To create a volume on an APFS container, follow these steps. To find out how to partition a drive on your Mac, read this article. So, if you have an APFS drive, it makes more sense to add a volume than partition the drive, as volumes can grow to accommodate more data as they need to. Containers are similar to partitions, but they can contain multiple volumes and allocate space to each volume as it’s required. APFS drives don’t use partitions they have containers. Apple now ships Macs with drives formatted as APFS instead of HFS+ (macOS Extended). The term partition is becoming outdated as far as macOS is concerned, however. That means you can install a different version of the OS on each partition and choose which one to run. And because macOS recognizes each volume separately, you can choose which volume to boot from. Files stored on one partition are stored separately from those on the other. Partitioning a hard drive or SSD is the process of splitting it into two separate volumes, each with its own allocated space on the drive. And if you no longer want to do these things, you may want to unpartition the hard drive on your Mac. If you’ve ever used Boot Camp on your Mac or created a partition to install a beta version of macOS so you can try it out without risking your existing data, you will have partitioned your boot drive.

But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. So here’s a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

How to unpartition an external hard drive mac