Maybe you’re a switcher who held onto Windows because you were worried that you’d need it. Maybe you’re finished\with the project, the job, or the phase of life that required you to use Windows on your Mac. But one way or another, there may come a time when you want to get rid of your Windows installation and reclaim all the hard drive space it was using. Not only can you do that, but the process won’t touch anything that’s already on the Mac side. You don’t have to erase your entire hard drive or anything—Snow Leopard simply erases what’s on the Windows partition of your hard drive, and then adds that disk space back to your main, Mac partition.
To do this, start by making sure you’ve rescued anything worth saving from the Windows side of your computer—it’s about to be erased.
Start up in Mac OS X, quit all open programs, and make sure nobody’s logged in but you. Now open up the Boot Camp Assistant program in your ApplicationsÆUtilities folder. On the welcome screen, click “Restore the startup disk to a single volume,” and then click Continue. That’s all there is to it.
Special notes for special setups: If you installed Windows on a separate hard drive, rather than a partition of your main hard drive, don’t bother with all this. Just erase the Windows hard drive using Disk Utility, format it as a Mac drive. On the other hand, if your Mac has more than one internal hard drive and you created a Windows partition on one ofthem (rather than taking it over completely), then open Boot Camp Assistant as described above. This time, though, click “Create or remove a Windows partition,” click Continue, click the Windows disk, and then click “Restore to a single Mac OS partition.”