Untitled partition is taking up internal disk space .. help!

[Kokurie]

Hi, I apologise for being an unexperienced person in terms of mac stuff, first and foremost.

So recently I have acquired an old macbook pro (mid 2009) from my relatives. They've installed windows 7 via bootcamp however I erased it from start up disk in preferences and in disk utility only macintosh HD is visible.

I would like to know if that is directly linked to the 'untitled' partition that is occupying a section of the entire internal disk space. As seen from the attachments, macintosh only makes up 51.54gb with the remaining 108.29gb from 'untitled'. Also there is a suspicious amount of space used up by 'music' apps and photos even though I cannot seem to find any traces of music or photos and the only apps are those which came with the laptop at the start. I'm honestly very clueless and may this seems very obvious to someone else and I would like some help.

Thanks!

 

[ferrarr]

Do you have your own Apple ID? If not create one.

What I would do is, download El Capitan, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206886, after you get your own Apple ID, and log in to the App Store. Then we can go over the procedures to make the drive one single partition.

 

[MacInWin]

To answer your question directly, yes, the Untitled partition was probably the Windows partition and should not have been removed the way you did. If the partition was put there by Bootcamp, then Bootcamp is the proper way to remove it. At this point I believe all you can do is to completely erase and repartition the drive and reinstall the OS from scratch. That is what Bob is probably headed for in his suggestion to get the El Cap installer. Doing the repartition will erase everything on the drive.

 

[Kokurie]

Yes, I have downloaded El Capitan through the app store, although I'm not sure how to merge the partitions, since well the files in 'untitled' partition seems to have been placed in macintosh hd and there is only macintosh hd exists when I go into disk utility :/ Like MacInWin said, its most likely due to me erasing the windows bootcamp partition in preferences> startup disk instead of through bootcamp assistant.

 

[Kokurie]

Ah I see.i tried to remove windows 7 with the boot camp assistant and restore the disk to a single volume to no avail with a message saying "an error occurred while restoring the disk to a single partition "popping up .

It probably doesn't say much, but I think I will go with the suggestion of erasing the drive completely and reinstalling all over. I've read that it can also be done with wiping the hard drive with recovery mode and disk utility ? Would they go about doing the same things. Since I don't need rly to keep anything and would like to start a new.

 

[ferrarr]

Since you have El Capitan downloaded, you should make a bootable USB installer. See this Apple Support Document for the easy procedure, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372, you will need a 16GB Flash Drive.

When you boot up from the USB, you can format and partition the internal drive into a single partition. Make sure to save any important data, before doing this.