Gravitational Pull

Apple makes deleting a Boot Camp partition super easy

Posted on 05 August 2009

A couple of years back, when I upgraded the hard drive on my then-new Macbook Pro, I used Apple’s incredible Boot Camp software to install Windows Vista. Using Boot Camp, you’re not just simulating running Windows under Mac OS X — you can actually boot up into “pure” Windows on your Apple hardware. The only complication was that Boot Camp required its own bit of my hard drive, it’s own partition in techno-speak, for the exclusive use of Windows. So I handed over 50 GB of my practically-empty 250 GB drive.

More recently, three trends have come together to make me regret that partitioning decision. First, the remaining 200 GB left to Mac OS X has gotten increasingly tight. With the growing library of all my iPod media on my laptop, I was down to only 25 GB of free space recently. Second, I have VMWare Fusion to run Windows virtually without having to reboot out of Mac OS X. Fusion used to lack some important features, like graphics acceleration, but it has improved and improved to the point where everything I need to do under Windows (stupid Sony digital recorder, I’m talking to you) works fine in Fusion.

And third, the only real reason I needed to run Windows Vista under Boot Camp (instead of just simulating it under VMWare Fusion), was to play games — well, really just one game, Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword, which was never released for the Mac. Until now!

Not needing that Windows partition anymore, I fretted that recovering the space and adding to my main partition would entail some litany of horrors like: back up every single thing, erase the whole drive, reinstall every single thing and, all the while, make plenty of sacrifices to the PC gods of yore.

Instead, it was drop-dead simple and completely painless. How to eliminate a Boot Camp Windows partition without breaking a sweat? Just run Apple’s Boot Camp Assistant program. Choose the option that says add or remove a Boot Camp partition. Recognizing that I already had a Boot Camp partition, the program automatically began the removal sequence. Just follow the directions and watch as 50 GB of ugly fat disappear and your Mac OS X drive gets more room to breath in under 2 minutes:

For what it’s worth, I also worried that I had to somehow deactivate or uninstall the copy of Windows Vista I was about to blow up in case I every wanted to use the same install disk on some future home brew PC. But there’s no way to deactivate Vista. Basically, you just go ahead and re-use the install disk. If the new OS installation won’t activate, you call Microsoft and tell them what’s what and they let you re-use the software. Or so I’m told, anyway.