Removing EFI partition from external Disk?
A few months ago I decided to format an external HD that I wish to use with my Mac mini, but I can not use 100% of it.
In the formatting process, a partition called EFI appeared. When I open the Disk Utility app, the partition is not displayed, but it was displayed by the command line using diskutil
.
Here is the Disk Utility:
From the command line: diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS MAC HD 881.0 GB disk0s2
3: Microsoft Reserved 16.8 MB disk0s3
4: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 118.9 GB disk0s4
/dev/disk1 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *640.1 GB disk1
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Microsoft Basic Data HD Caio 639.9 GB disk1s2
How can I recover the space lost to disk1s1?
EFI partition is a partition that stores boot files for operating systems, but since it is an external drive, it's not needed. When you erase your disk and create a new GUID Partitioning Table on it, macOS will automatically create an EFI partition. If you don't want that EFI partition, you have a few options:
- You can erase your disk and create a new MBR instead of GPT. To do this, follow these steps:
- Open Terminal. You can use spotlight to find it
- Make sure your external disk is inserted. Type
diskutil list
and identify your disk (in the output you provided, it looks like it'sdisk1
). - Type
diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ MYDISK MBR diskX
and replacediskX
with the actual disk's identifier (for example,disk1
) - Your disk will be erased without an EFI partition now.
- You can use diskpart.exe to partition the disk on Windows. Windows doesn't create an EFI partition.