When using “Disk Utility,” after booting onto the recovery partition, I can't:
- Re-partition
- Delete partitions
- Repair partitions
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2 Answers
There are limits to how much you can do with your hard drive when you've booted the recovery partition. Even though the recovery partition is a separate partition, it still locks your drive to some extend, and prevents you from doing "live edits" - primarily modifying the partition table.
Instead of holding down the Alt key, and booting onto the recovery partition; hold down Command+Shift+R. Doing this will download the utilities package from the Internet, and put it in memory. This "unlocks" your hard drive, and lets you re-partition it.
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1That doesn't seem to work on my MacBook Pro, is there any way of being sure that it is using Internet-based utilities versus the internal disk. Dec 9, 2017 at 22:34
The answer would be to reinstall macOS. I had the same problem, and it doesn't let you make the macOS partition smaller, because it says that 'the minimum size is ... GB'. No matter how many big files you delete; this value will never decrease.
So once your hard drive is full of data, you cannot resize the data partition, which makes sense. But let's say you delete like 200GB of files, you still can't resize it. 'The minimum size is ... GB'. I think you know what I wanna say.
As far as I know, unfortunately there is no way to get out of this situation than reinstalling macOS. To do that, use your recovery partition (holding the Alt key on reboot) or if that ain't work (which is the case if your Mac was shipped with an OS that doesn't understand the new APFS file system, which will your reinstallation make never work), you could try to reinstall from the internet by holding Command+Shift+R on reboot.
I don't have any experience with internet recovery, but a solution that did work for me was creating my own installation drive for Big Sur. Select it on boot by holding the Alt key, and it will work.
With all this done (reinstalled macOS), you should be able to resize your drive. But keep in mind that the more your drive gets filled, the less you can decrease the size of it.
