The all so popular partition erase issue.

[elazul]

I'm pretty sure I have checked everywhere that I can in the forums to find an answer, but maybe I didn't check well enough. Usually I can find the answer I'm looking for with enough searching. This is basically my last resort before starting from complete scratch on my mac. I have created a second partition using bootcamp for ubuntu before, and had no issues. I decided to erase the partitions to get the memory back, and had no issues. Everything erased just fine and I was back with one partition. This time, however, I got as far as booting up Linux and coming to a "no boot disk" issue. Of course, I found the solution (sync the two partitions from refit) after I decided to try and erase the partition and start all over. The partition did not erase. Up until this point, I have tried erasing from disk utility (both ways: clicking erase, or going to the main HD and then partition and then selected the bootcamp drive and clicking the minus button. It sits there saying "preparing to remove volume" and never does anything else.) I have also tried erasing by booting with the Leopard Disk and going through disk utility and the ubuntu disk and trying that. I have also tried using bootcamp assistant but common issues have come up with that as well (it tells me to reformat, once I do that it still does not work). So, unless there is something I am missing, I am in a pickle and I am about ready to erase everything and start fresh. Unless of course someone has any solutions. Please help.

 

[newdeal]

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I am not totally clear on the problem but there is a program called ipartition that you may want to try it allows non-destructive modification of the main partition which disk utility does not allow.

 

[elazul]

Yeah, I searched everywhere I could think and tried all the solutions that other people have tried for similar issues but nothing seems to work. I will try ipartition though, thanks newdeal.

Edit:
So I tried ipartition, whenever I click on any of the drives that I want to erase it says "You cannot make changes to the disk from which your system booted.
To make changes to this disk, you should either boot from an external drive, use Target Disk Mode with another Mac, or create a bootable CD/DVD." I have already tried booting from the leopard disk and that did not work...unless I did something wrong or I am not understanding what booting from an eternal drive is.

 

[newdeal]

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do you have an external hard drive? If you do use carbon copy cloner to clone your drive onto it, then boot from that drive and make the changes

 

[elazul]

I don't have an eternal hard drive. I decided to go with a full re-install of leopard. Once everything was finished, made a second partition once again. I gave 20GB to the second partition. I think I can pinpoint the issue now but I still can't solve it. When I boot up with the Ubuntu 8.0.4.1 disk (iso, I burnt it myself, and its worked before) and get to the "prepare disk space" menu I choose the first one which is just the 20GB partition that I created and it click forward. This is where the issue starts. When I look at the 20GB partition, it shows as 20.8GB. When I click forward, it says "invalid size" and won't let me continue. So I thought maybe i could just resize the 20.8 to what I set it at which is the 20GB. So I do this and press forward, everything seems to work fine, it installs, I restart and boot up Ubuntu from rEFIt and it freezes on the penguin screen. Now, before I installed Ubuntu for the second time, I tried removing the BOOTCAMP partition with bootcamp assistant, and it worked, but now once again after the Ubuntu install, I cannot erase, delete, minus or even remove anything with disk utility or bootcamp assistant. I think the issue is when I decreased the 20.8 to 20 and installed. It created 3 partitions labelled as such: Bootcamp, disk0s4, and Linux swap. I cannot do anything t get rid of them, and Linux will not boot up. Any ideas?