Removing partitions with disk utility fails.

[kaopor]

Hi everyone,

seems that i have messed up my Macbookpro hark disk.

opening disk utility on macosx 10.5.8 shows that my disk in partitioned as this:
1)Macintosh HD
2)Apple_HFS disk0s3
3)Linux Swap

all of them appear to formatted as Mac OS extended (journaled) although the Linux Swap partition appears as Unmounted and cant be mounted nor use first aid on it. the others 2 appear to ok on verify disk test.

what i want to do is remove partition 2 and 3.
as i mention disk utility fails both under macosx and also when i use it booting from macosx install disk.

should i use something like g-parted to boot from and re arrange my partitions or will this further mess up my disk? will MBR be affected?

any ideas are welcome and any help appreciated

 

[Fishrrman]

"opening disk utility on macosx 10.5.8 shows that my disk in partitioned as this:
1)Macintosh HD
2)Apple_HFS disk0s3
3)Linux Swap
what i want to do is remove partition 2 and 3.
any ideas are welcome and any help appreciated"

Sure-fire method, guaranteed to work, 100%:

1. Attach an external drive large enough to hold contents of partition #1
2. Use CarbonCopyCloner to "dupe" contents of partition 1 to the external drive
3. REBOOT, this time starting from the EXTERNAL drive (and cloned contents of original drive).
4. Use Disk Utility to RE-Initialize the internal drive, this time choosing only a single partition.
5. Use CarbonCopyCloner to "re-clone" the contents of the external back to the internal drive.

So long as you can succesfully boot from the "cloned copy" on the external drive, this should do the trick. In fact, it's probably the preferred way to do it, completely eliminating any artifacts of the "old partitions".