Passing Curiosity: Posts tagged ubuntu https://passingcuriosity.com/tags/ubuntu/ubuntu.xml Thomas Sutton me@thomas-sutton.id.au 2011-01-18T00:00:00Z Getting rid of Boot Camp volumes https://passingcuriosity.com/2011/getting-rid-of-bootcamp-volumes/ 2011-01-18T00:00:00Z 2011-01-18T00:00:00Z I’ve spent the last few hours fighting to get rid of the Boot Camp, Ubuntu Linux and rEFIt volumes on my Macbook Pro. It was a struggle, but I got there in the end. I don’t want to think about this any more but Google and the internets should probably know how to resolve this problem, so here are some cursory notes.

I should probably say that I’m not sure who or what is to blame for the problem described here. I suspect one, the other, or the combination of rEFIt and Boot Camp but I’m not sure. I also blame Disk Utility for its rather shocking lack of utility.

  1. Used Boot Camp Assistant to create a partition for a Windows install (as if!)

  2. Installed Ubuntu instead of Windows.

  3. Installed rEFIt (I’m still not sure if it was necessary).

  4. Got sick of all that space being wasted with an Ubuntu install I never use.

  5. Deleted the various Linux partitions in Disk Utility.

  6. Removed rEFIt (by changing the Boot Volume in System Preferences and deleting the /efi/ folder).

  7. Shrank the system volume.

  8. Attempted to allocate the space that was the Linux partitions and the free space from the system volume to a new partition for data. This failed with a MediaKit reports partition (map) too small error.

  9. Attempted to grow the system volume to fill the whole disk. This too failed with a MediaKit reports partition (map) too small error.

  10. Discovered by reading some truly mind-numbing Apple discussion forum threads and other old, ill-informed, and old-and-ill-informed hits from Google that doing things manually using the command line tools may work.

  11. Noticed from diskutil list that I had two EFI partitions (one after my system volume) and, as Disk Utility doesn’t mention them, that this extra partition is the reason for the error (and that whomever chose to emit that error in this case is a shit).

  12. Became annoyed that diskutil doesn’t seem to have a subcommand to delete (Why do Apple insist on calling them verbs?) slices and fdisk is nearly useless (unless you enjoy calculating disk geometry manually), but that it is possible to reformat a volume and change its type by erasing it like so:

    sudo diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ UntitledHFS disk0s4

  13. Deleted this new volume in Disk Utility and created a new one filling the entire free space.

Hope this helps someone else.

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