Where did the free space for my deleted ExFAT partition go?

Question

I had these partitions on an external hard drive:

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk2
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Android                 63.9 GB    disk2s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS RiptideHUP              968.0 GB   disk2s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data RiptideF                967.8 GB   disk2s4

My aim was to delete disk2s2 and then resize disk2s3 to occupy the leftover space by deleting disk2s2. I deleted disk2s2 using this command:

diskutil  erasevolume  "Free Space"  ""  /dev/disk2s2

Now, to resize the volume, I used:

diskutil  resizevolume  /dev/disk2s3  R

However, I got this error:

Started partitioning on disk2s3 RiptideHUP Error: -69743: The new size
must be different than the existing size

Can someone help me and tell me where I went wrong?

NOTE: Using diskutil list now shows:

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk2
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS RiptideHUP              968.0 GB   disk2s3
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data RiptideF                967.8 GB   disk2s4

Answer 1

The command diskutil resizevolume /dev/disk2s3 R requires the free space to reside after disk2s3. The command diskutil erasevolume "Free Space" "" /dev/disk2s2 created free space before disk2s3. There is no or very little free space between disk2s3 and disk2s4. This is why you received the error message.