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I have a mac from 2006 and it is already not supported by the new Apple system, so I decided to install Ubuntu 13.04. I installed is alongside OSX, but I noticed that Ubuntu installed itself on a FAT partition. Why is Ubuntu using a FAT partition? Can I change it to EXT4 without losing my data and configuration?

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    Ubuntu can not be installed on a FAT partition so you will have to be more specific to glean the source of your misunderstanding.
    – psusi
    May 6, 2013 at 0:38
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    Rod Smith is right, OSX disk manager did lye to me, he did show fat partition and other apps did show ext4.
    – Zagroda
    May 6, 2013 at 8:05

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My suspicion is that Zagroda is seeing the EFI System Partition (ESP), which is FAT. Another possibility is that an OS X utility is reporting partition types based on their type codes; Ubuntu 13.04 still uses the same type code for its data partitions as Windows uses for FAT and NTFS. A fix to libparted has been in the works for two years, but the libparted developers have been sluggish in pushing it out. The output of both sudo parted /dev/sda print and sudo gdisk -l /dev/sda would be informative. (The latter will require installing the gdisk package.)

If this is the case, it's because Disk Manager is using the GPT type code data, which Linux sets incorrectly. You can fix this by using gdisk from either Linux or OS X: Launch it, type p to view the partitions, and then use t to change the type code of any Linux partition shown as being of type 0700 so that it's of type 8300. When you're done, review your changes with p and then type w to save them.

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