Cannot merge partitions of external hard drive
I have a 2TB Toshiba hard drive that somehow ended up like this:
diskutil list
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk2
1: DOS_FAT_32 EXTDISK 43.5 MB disk2s1
2: Windows_NTFS extdisk 1.8 GB disk2s2
with those two partitions of 43 MB and 1.8GB. I want to delete and merge into NTFS both of them. When I delete both, using disk utility, it does not merge them. How can I do that?
You can not NTFS format from macOS. You may have been using the ExFAT format.
Below are some possible commands to create a single formatted partition.
For MS-DOS FAT32 format use:
diskutil partitiondisk disk2 1 mbr FAT32 EXTDISK R
For ExFAT format use:
diskutil partitiondisk disk2 1 mbr ExFAT EXTDISK R
For Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
diskutil partitiondisk disk2 1 mbr JHFS+ EXTDISK R
For example, if you want the ExFAT format, the below is the output you should see by entering the appropriate commands. Of course, your 2 TB drive will probably be sightly different in size from mine.
Davids-iMac:~ davidanderson$ diskutil list disk2
/dev/disk2 (external, physical:
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme +2.0 TB disk2
1: DOS_FAT_32 EXTDISK 43.5 MB disk2s1
2: Windows_NTFS extdisk 1.8 GB disk2s2
Davids-iMac:~ davidanderson$ diskutil partitiondisk disk2 1 mbr ExFAT ExtDisk R
Started partitioning on disk2
Unmounting disk
Creating the partition map
Waiting for partitions to activate
Formatting disk2s1 as ExFAT with name ExtDisk
Volume name : ExtDisk
Partition offset : 2 sectors (1024 bytes)
Volume size : 3906250061 sectors (2000000031232 bytes)
Bytes per sector : 512
Bytes per cluster: 131072
FAT offset : 2048 sectors (1048576 bytes)
# FAT sectors : 120832
Number of FATs : 1
Cluster offset : 122880 sectors (62914560 bytes)
# Clusters : 15258309
Volume Serial # : 5a7b6783
Bitmap start : 2
Bitmap file size : 1907289
Upcase start : 17
Upcase file size : 5836
Root start : 18
Mounting disk
Finished partitioning on disk2
/dev/disk2 (external, physical:
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme +2.0 TB disk2
1: Windows_NTFS ExtDisk 2.0 TB disk2s1
Davids-iMac:~ davidanderson$