How To Remove Boot Camp Partition From Mac
Are you receiving that uncomfortable notification from macOS informing you that “your disk is almost full“? You can save space by optimizing storage using iCloud Drive – if you rent enough space from Apple – or reclaim space by removing the Boot Camp partition that was required when you installed the Windows operating system.
What Is the Boot Camp Partition?
Mar 23, 2020 You can remove the partition of internal as well as an external hard drive or SSD using Disk Utility. Just to be on the safe side, I would recommend that you take a backup of your Mac. Important: If you want to remove partition created by Boot Camp, then do not use Disk Utility. Use Boot Camp to delete the Windows partition and get back the space. Boot Camp is a native macOS utility mainly used for running multiple operating systems. Despite the regular application status, removing a Boot Camp partition is nothing similar to deleting a regular Mac app. You can erase unwanted partition with the help of Boot Camp Assistant or Mac’s very own Disk Utility.
Software incompatibility may force some Mac users to take the ultimate step and install Windows on their computer using Boot Camp. As with every operating system, Windows requires its own partition and its own file systems, which means to use it on a Mac requires you to repartition the drive using Boot Camp assistant in order to install the Windows operating system.
If you are installing Windows for the first time, you will require at least 30GB of free space, increasing to 40GB if you are upgrading from a previous version of Windows. This space will be taken up on the built-in hard drive (which may have limited storage space), allocated to the Windows OS during the installation process. This newly created partition will be named Boot Camp by default.
Regardless of how much disk space you have allocated to Windows, it is nothing more than a waste of storage if your startup disk is getting full, and so in these situations it is recommended that users either wipe away the macOS partition using Mac optimization software such as CleanMyMac, OnyX, and the like, or remove the Boot Camp partition to reclaim gigabytes of disk space.
How to Remove the Boot Camp Partition
- Back up all the data that you need from the partition.
- Start the Mac in macOS.
- Quit all open apps and log out of any other users that are currently logged in.
- Open up Launchpad, click Utilities, and then Boot Camp Assistant.
- Click the “Continue” button.
- If you’re prompted to select a task, click on either “Remove Windows 7 or later version” or “Remove Windows 10 or later version”, whichever is relevant. Then hit “Continue”.
- If your Mac has a single internal disk, then you'll see a “Restore Disk to a Single Volume” window; click “Restore”.
- If your computer has multiple internal disks, select the Boot Camp disk with Windows installed on it and hit “Restore disk to a single macOS partition”, followed by “Continue”. Depending on the size of the drive this may take a few minutes.
- Click “Quit” once the process is complete. Launch Disk Utility and check if the drive is no longer available just to confirm that the Boot Camp partition has been removed.
Some users complain about receiving the “Your disk could not be restored to a single partition” error message, and therefore being prevented from restoring the internal drive back to a single partition. If, for some reason, Boot Camp fails to remove the partition, then you can always turn to Disk Utility, a powerful tool built into macOS.
- Launch Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
- Select the Windows partition.
- Click “Erase” and select either the “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” for Macs running macOS 10.12 Sierra or earlier, or “APFS file system” for users on macOS 10.13 High Sierra and beyond.
- Erase the partition.
- Select the complete disk.
- Click on the Partition tab.
- Select the newly formatted “Windows” partition and remove it by clicking on the minus button in the bottom left.
- Select the main partition and type in its full size into the “Size” option, then hit enter.
- Let Disk Utility complete the resizing to restore your full macOS-compatible partition once again.
In a previous tutorial we showed you how to create a macOS Boot Camp partition for installing Windows 10 on a MacBook Pro. The process, while not difficult, can be slightly time consuming, especially if you have a slow Internet connection for downloading Windows 10.
Outside of the time it takes, another downside associated with creating a Boot Camp partition is that it can take up a significant amount of space on your primary drive. Since some Macs are fairly limited when it comes to internal storage space, having a large Boot Camp partition can make it tricky to manage storage space in macOS.
In this follow-up tutorial, we show you how to remove the Boot Camp partition from your Mac, which allows your primary macOS partition to reclaim its space. Unlike the Boot Camp creation + Windows 10 installation process, removing a Boot Camp partition couldn’t be easier. Watch our hands-on video walkthrough for the details.
Step 1: Back up any needed data stored on the Windows 10 partition.
Step 2: Launch Boot Camp Assistant, which is found in the Other folder when opening Launchpad or the Utilities folder under Applications in Finder.
Step 3: Click Continue.
Step 4: Click Restore to remove the Windows partition and restore the disk to a single-partition volume for macOS. The restore process, depending on the size of the partition and drive, may take a few minutes.
Step 5: Click Quit once the restore process is complete. You can now confirm via Disk Utility that the Boot Camp partition has been removed.
Video walkthrough
How To Remove Boot Camp Partition From Mac Free
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As initially mentioned, one of the reasons you may wish to remove a Windows partition on your Mac is to recover the space associated with that partition. When initially creating the partition, you’re asked to allocate space from your main drive to the Boot Camp partition. This reduces the amount of free space available for macOS, which can cause inconveniences when operating Boot Camp on a system with limited storage.
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Cannot Remove Bootcamp Partition
If you’d like to learn how to install Windows 10 on your Mac, be sure to watch our hands-on video that shows how to properly wield Boot Camp Assistant. It’s also a good idea to learn how to backup your Boot Camp installation, which can easily be accomplished by following our hands-on Winclone tutorial.
Do you run Windows on your Mac using Boot Camp? I do so, particularly because Windows 10 is a much better gaming platform than macOS. If you use Windows on your Mac, please share your reasons for doing so in the comments below.
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