How can i extend my partition further than the limit? Disk Utility So I am trying to make my partition full size but there seems to be a limit. I am on OS X 10.8.5 using Disk Utility.



I am using a MacBook 4,1 (early 2008) 

Ok so I used MacPostFactor to install mountain lion with my friends copy of the installer. I deleted my Lion partition.

The output of diskutil cs list and sudo gpt -r show disk0: 

Last login: Mon Nov 21 17:00:35 on ttys001
Daniels-MacBook:~ danieljensen$ diskutil cs list
No CoreStorage logical volume groups found
Daniels-MacBook:~ danieljensen$ sudo gpt -r show disk0
Password:
      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         PMBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2         32         Pri GPT table
         34          6         
         40     409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
     409640  117650752         
  118060392  106863504      2  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  224923896    9517712      3  GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  234441608          7         
  234441615         32         Sec GPT table
  234441647          1         Sec GPT header
Your Mac officially doesn't support Mountain Lion so the how-to below may fail!



You can't move ("backward-expand") the beginning of an existing partition to "lower" physical block numbers (with 0: the first block and 234441647: the last block and your Mountain Lion partition starts somewhere in the middle) with Disk Utility.

You will be able to create a new partition in the unallocated disk space and restore your existing Mountain Lion partition to it though. Then remove the old partition and expand the new one to the full size.

Since your Mac can't boot to Internet Recovery Mode, you need a second boot media (e.g. a thumb drive) with a basic system or a full fledged system.


Create a bootable Lion thumb drive
Boot to the thumb drive
Open Terminal and enter diskutil list and (assuming your internal disk has the disk identifier disk0) sudo gpt -r show disk0 to get an overview
Unmount your internal disk:

diskutil umountDisk disk0

Add a partition in the unallocated disk space:

sudo gpt add -i 4 -b 409640 -s 117650752 -t 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC disk0

Enter diskutil list and get the identifier of the new partition with the size 60.2 GB (your original ML volume has the size 57.1 GB). This may be disk0s2 or disk0s4
Format the partition with newfs_hfs:

newfs_hfs -v "New" -J /dev/disk0sX #use the proper identifier here

Close Terminal and open Disk Utility
Restore the Mountain Lion volume to New.
Boot to the restored Mountain Lion volume (AFAIR you will see two volumes with the name Mountain Lion in StartVolume, so boot to the proper one!) to check if it works.
If everything works open Disks Utility and remove the second Mountain Lion partition. Expand the first Mountain Lion to the full size.