First Mac bricked hard drive?

[Delithril]

I bought a Mac mini mid 2010 model. I’ve always been a Windows guy but I thought heh I’ll givenit a try. So it had a 320 gig hdd and because I needed it to run some simple Windows games I thought I’ll set up a dual boot. I did boot camp and the most it would give Windows was 40 gigs but I read on some Mac forum a guy went ahead and installed on the 40 gigs deleted the partition using boot camp then reinstalled Windows and got half the hard drive. So I did that but when I went to reinstall Windows all I could get is 40 gigs again. So I thought what if I create a fat partition using disk Utility? Well I did that and still it would only give me 40 gigs. So I went to disk Utility and deleted the partition to make it one big partition again. But after it completed I only have 160 gigs and when I try to repartition the drive it gives me an error. I did a restore still 160 gigs. I wiped the thing and reinstalled the os from scratch still 160 gigs. Can anyone help me before this thing becomes a $150 fire in my backyard. Thanks in advance


EDIT: when I go into disk utility and hit partition it sees the 320 gigs. But it gives me an error if I try to partition that drive now.

 

[kepler.donald]

Using recovery mode you need to erase the hard drive at drive level i.e. select Apple HDD and then try erasing it. This is what happens when BootCamp is not removed through BootCamp Assistant.

 

[Delithril]

Using recovery mode you need to erase the hard drive at drive level i.e. select Apple HDD and then try erasing it. This is what happens when BootCamp is not removed through BootCamp Assistant.

I did that. I went to recovery mode selected the hard drive hit erase selected the one with (journaled after it) still only half my hard drive. I even did a full reinstall of the operating system. The only thing I can see is unmounting the drive and reinstalling from a cd I think is an option. Any thing else you can think of. See in Windows worst case scenario just wipe and reinstall. Here I know nothing.

Also when I removed the windows partition I went to boot camp and told it to put the partition back the way it was. It was fine then. It was until I used disk utility to split the hard drive and put it back that this happened

 

[kepler.donald]

The problem doesn’t seems to be the installation but your drive spaces that might have got unrecognized after it got erased by the system’s Disk Utility. Normally, erasing a HDD completely will bring back the original drive size for reconstruction of new partitions etc. In your case, this doesn’t seem to be working. Try re-installing the OS using a USB. You can create one for High Sierra.

 

[Delithril]

The problem doesn’t seems to be the installation but your drive spaces that might have got unrecognized after it got erased by the system’s Disk Utility. Normally, erasing a HDD completely will bring back the original drive size for reconstruction of new partitions etc. In your case, this doesn’t seem to be working. Try re-installing the OS using a USB. You can create one for High Sierra.

Ok I’ll give that a try and get back you ya. Thanks for the help so far.

 

[Delithril]

The problem doesn’t seems to be the installation but your drive spaces that might have got unrecognized after it got erased by the system’s Disk Utility. Normally, erasing a HDD completely will bring back the original drive size for reconstruction of new partitions etc. In your case, this doesn’t seem to be working. Try re-installing the OS using a USB. You can create one for High Sierra.

Do I have to use the terminal to create an iso then use that to make a bootable usb or is there an easier way?

 

[honestone]

Do I have to use the terminal to create an iso then use that to make a bootable usb or is there an easier way?

No, you don't have to use Terminal. This link describes 3 ways to do it (including using Terminal):

https://www.macworld.com/article/30...-a-bootable-macos-sierra-installer-drive.html

If it were my choice, I would choose DiskMaker X. But it looks like Disk Creator would work too. Note that both of those applications are free.