When I got my Mac, I set it up with the new Boot Camp option, with a partition so that I could run Windows and Windows only programs on it. However, I’ve found that I don’t need that option, and would rather use that extra memory for other stuff.
How do I de-partition it?
Are you running a time machine backup? If so I would just nuke and pave the drive and restore from the backup - it will take about half an hour but you’ll get a perfect copy of your system but with the large partition.
I’m not sure you can easily destroy the partition without putting your data at risk (on the Mac partition you want to keep) so ideally you want to back up anyway.
You could also use Disk Utility to reformat the other partition as HFS+, so you’d have two Mac drives mounted on your desktop from the one drive.
My suggestion would be to nuke and pave and restore from backup. I’m sure there are some third party partition tools around, but there is always a chance they will hose the drive and require a full format anyway if something goes wrong.
Back-up, quit all apps and log-out any other users, open Boot-Camp Assistant in the utilities folder, choose “remove Windows partition.” Et voila.
You’re used to working on Windows boxes, aren’t you? This is typically how I fix them.
This is the right way to do it.
Just to note that you will recover disk space, but no memory per se. To use that disk space you’ll have to create another Mac volume on it.
No you won’t. It merges it with your existing partition. (Been there, done that. I now use VMWare Fusion with a disk image, because it’s a lot easier to resize and doesn’t waste as much space).
In the sense that “memory” typically means RAM, not disk space, it is true that none of this will give you any more memory.