Dual-Booting Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 11.10

[schusteltz]

Hello,

I recently installed a new HDD into my white MacBook (5,2 - early 2009) and installed Snow Leopard from a Time Machine back-up with no problems. I made a partition to install Ubuntu 11.10 and got it installed. I used Bootcamp and Disk Utility.

Currently, it looks pretty messy when I look at my HDD in Disk Utility. I have the following partitions and sizes:
1. Macintosh HD (Snow Leopard) - 662 GB
2. BOOTCAMP - 3.2 GB - FAT-32
3. DISK0S5 - 36.75 GB - FAT-32
4. Linux Swap - 4.02 GB
5. disk0S7 - 1 MB
6. disk0S8 - 39.82 GB - FAT-32
7. Linux Swap - 4 GB

I am unsure why I have two partitions of nearly 40 GB (numbers 3 and 6). I only wanted my Snow Leopard partition and then an Ubuntu partition of 40GB.

If anyone has an idea or solution to this, I would be very appreciative. This is my first time doing a dual-boot setup.

 

[schusteltz]

UPDATE from OP

OK, so I was able to delete those partitions with Disk Utility. I was getting error messages about Media Kit saying the partitions were too small, but they went away.

 

[minifridge1138]

It looks like you installed linux twice.
I see 2 swap partitions and 2 OS partitions.
Very odd.

The other option is something in your disk's partition table got messed up and reported the partitions twice.

Glad you got it fixed.

What size hard drive do you have?

 

[schusteltz]

Well, I did it once. Couldn't get my MacBook to boot into Snow Leopard (it just went to GRUB). I reset the PRAM and that did the trick. Then, I restarted holding down the option (alt) key and couldn't get to my Ubuntu partition. I then repeated the same process of installing Ubuntu and ended up with a second Ubuntu partition (each with their swap partitions).

I had a hard time getting my trackpad to work in Ubuntu 11.10. The trackpad on my MacBook was not very responsive and very jerky, regardless of the mouse settings in Ubuntu. My wireless Apple trackpad was smoother, but still very slow.

I have a 750 GB HDD. I currently have a single, contiguous, Snow Leopard partition. However, I'd still like add the 40 GB Ubuntu partition.

----------

It was a pretty nerve-wrecking time to say the least, haha. I guess I just expected a nice, clean entry into Ubuntu with peripherals intact.

 

[minifridge1138]

I wouldn't use disk utility or boot camp.

I'd just use Ubuntu's disk formatter.
Shrink your existing SL partition by 40 gigs, create an extended partition out of the space.
Then within the extended partition create a 4 gig swap drive and the rest for the OS.

I've never done it with OSX and Linux, but that's what I used to do with Windows and Linux.

Keep the time machine backup just in case.

 

[Treeant34]

Re Mac Ubuntu

Might want to have a look at this...

http://www.youtube.com/user/TechHarvest/videos?query=Mac+Triple+Boot