By Keith Mitnick on Thursday, 04 February 2016
Category: General

Using diskutil to partition a disk

I’m not a fan of the new Disk Utility in El Capitan.  I had a drive with 3 partitions and I needed to make it a single partition drive. Disk Utility would not allow me to delete one of the partitions no matter what I tried.

So I used the following Terminal command:



diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk2 GPT JHFS+ New 0b



To break it down:

1.  diskutil - is a command line tool used for formatting disks.

2.  patitionDisk -  is an option that can be used in diskutil.

3.  /dev/disk2 -  is the location of the disk that you want to format.  You can use the diskutil “list” option  to find this information.

4.  GPT -  is the GUID Partition Table.

5.  JHFS+ - is the default filesystem type that OS X uses.

6.  New - This is the name of the partition.  You can name it whatever you like.

7.  0b - This tells the command to use all available free disk space.

Leave Comments