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Okay so big project here. I'm currently on a MacBook with Ubuntu 11.10 installed. I have Ubuntu installed because in the process of trying to partition my harddrive to put ubuntu on it... I hosed the hard drive and until today I didn't know where the Mac OSX install disc is. My Ubuntu installation is running on the whole HDD. No partitions. I would like to, at the very least, partition the disc and put Mac OSX back on it. I might even want to get rid of Ubuntu completely and revert back to Mac OS X. I don't really know anything about partitioning my harddrive though and I'm afraid to do it without learning as much as possible because that's how I lost everything last time.

So the question is... How do I partition my harddrive in the correct way so that I can install Mac on the other partition or how do I remove Ubuntu so that Mac can be installed?

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Hello, this question has no information and activity for a very long time. I am closing it for now. If by any reason you think this question is still viable or useful in anyways or that there is still a good chance it will be answered please flag it to a moderator or add a comment with the reasons why you want it open. Regards – Bruno Pereira Mar 4 '12 at 20:27

closed as not a real question by Bruno Pereira Mar 4 '12 at 20:27

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

I don't know where a tutorial is, but to know what to do it would really help to know what you want to do.

I haven't recently installed a Mac OS, so I don't know whether the Mac installation process lets you use different directories for /, /User, /usr, etc. If it does, you might be fine leaving your Ubuntu partition where it is and creating different partitions for user data, applications, etc. This is however quite complicated and you may not want to get into that.

If you want to have Mac OS and Ubuntu permanently dual-bootable, I would advise you to keep your Ubuntu partition where it is (or at least the leftmost point as moving that will likely take several hours). What you can do is use gparted (in a terminal run "sudo apt-get install gparted" without quote marks if it is not already installed; also you will need to use a live disk as the filesystem root has to be unmounted) to make a new partition after the Ubuntu partition starting in about the middle of the disk (before middle if you want Mac to have a bigger partition, after middle if you want Ubuntu to have a bigger partition). Format the new Mac partition to HFS+. Then run the Mac OS installation and install to that partition (if the Mac OS installation disk allows you to partition the hard disk from within the installation, skip all the stuff about gparted and partition it there, using the same settings described above).

If you want to permanently remove Ubuntu and just run Mac OS, delete the Ubuntu partition and make the Mac OS partition the first on the hard disk. Format it to HFS+ (again using gparted from a live session) and install the Mac OS to it. Again, if you can format the disk from within the Mac OS installation feel free to do that.

After creating [a] sytem partition(s), your partition scheme is really up to you. This is probably a lot to digest and may not be very clearly worded so please respond again if you have any more questions or need clarification. Such general questions often do not have simple answers.

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That is alot to digest you're right. What do I do to actually make the partitions? I meant that to be the actual question. You were talking more about what to do with the partitions themselves. – CaldwellYSR Dec 26 '11 at 6:38

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