Saturday, August 11, 2012

Throwing it all away and starting new

In the previous post I attempted to recover the partitioning of the drive and it looked like I had done it, but there were still issues afterwards apparently, mostly due to rEfit screwing things up (it has its own utility in the startup screen). I went back into the Disk Utility, which attempted a repair and then into gdisk, which caused more issues even then. The disk looked like this:
1 EFI
2 Mac OSX
3 Recovery
4 Recovery
5 Linux boot
6 Linux home
7 swap

It was impossible to zap any recovery and the MBR was a complete mess. I've basically done the following:
  1. Recreated my external disk. 20G allocated to the mountain lion installer and the rest as a new partition for Time Machine. I just used Disk Utility and set up 2 partitions, pretty straight-forward. Make sure the partition type in Options is set to GUID partition table.
  2. Created the Mac OSX installer partition onto the external drive. That's basically using the "Show package contents", finding the installerESD.img file and copying that into the partition using "Restore" in Disk Utility.
  3. Saved my Mac OSX partition into Time Machine. Takes a while. Waited for Time Machine to complete.
  4. Restarted the Mac and booting into the external drive with the installer. Press the Option key when rebooting the machine.
  5. Completely repartitioned the main drive using the disk utility in two partitions. The first being the main Mac partition that I intend to use mostly as Mac OSX extended (Journaled). The second as free space. Note that there's no specific partition for the Recovery HD here yet. EFI is automatically created.
  6. Then I restored the copy from Time Machine into the main partition. Waited for this to finish.
  7. Rebooted into the Mac using the main drive (partition just created and loaded up).
  8. Now you can recreate the Recovery partition at the end of this partition using this page: http://musings.silvertooth.us/2012/03/restoring-a-lost-recovery-partition-in-lion/ . Some more background info: https://plus.google.com/108724035107725322855/posts/Y33cF3cJR9o
  9. Then I installed Ubuntu Linux using a special Mac Linux amd64 installer. The 10.10 version is available here: http://releases.ubuntu.com/oneiric/.

1 comment:

Stuart Bell said...

Its very easy to repartition a Mac drive but the case goes little critical when it come to a boot drive.

My tool Stellar Partition manager, first creates a bootable DVD and then allows to work on boot drive.