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A friend recently gave me his old MacBook Pro with Ubuntu 16.04 on it. I really want to install Mac OS on it so I downloaded an installer and ran it on a USB. I got the installer up and running but it would not recognize the internal hard drive because it was formatted to ext4. How can I change the hard disk back to Mac OS Extended??

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  • is there not a disk tool on the osx disk? Look in the menu for disks, it should be able to format it's own disk...
    – Mateo
    May 29, 2016 at 6:03
  • Close voters: formatting a hard disk from ubuntu is most certainly on-topic on a site about Ubuntu...!
    – Seth
    May 29, 2016 at 19:21

1 Answer 1

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Head over to ubuntu.com and download Ubuntu. Then follow these instructions to burn the downloaded ISO image to a flash drive. Once that's done reboot the computer and boot to the USB, clicking "try ubuntu" when the option presents itself.

You will need a few packages to add HFS support, so connect the machine to the network, then open a terminal and run:

sudo apt-get install hfsutils hfsprogs

Once the installation process has finished, open gparted and find the ext4 partitions you want to reformat. Right click on them and select Format to -> hfs+.

enter image description here

Follow through on any prompts, and then let the program do its thing. Once it is finished, you're done!

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  • I ended up just erasing the drive because Parted would not let me change the partitions.
    – user549775
    May 31, 2016 at 2:15
  • @user549775 did you follow my directions exactly?
    – Seth
    May 31, 2016 at 2:16

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