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I cannot delete a LINUX swap partition

I wanted to install Ubuntu on my MacBook Pro, and lets say due to an oversight, I ended up with no Ubuntu on my machine, but a Linux swap partition which the Mac cannot mount and cannot erase.
I've tried formatting the Linux swap partition, and then erasing it using disk utility. I even tired removing it after booting from the Leopard installation CD, but it would not remove the partition. Disk utility recognizes the partition as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume, but cannot mount/erase/remove the partition.
I've tried using iPartition and Drive Genius, but none of those programs worked either.

After digging around in the terminal a bit, I found that the the Linux swap partition is not in the volumes directory of the system (/Volumes/), but is in the dev path:
/dev/

After some googling, I tried using:
& sudo gpt remove -i 3 /dev/disk0s3

but i got the following result:
gpt remove: /dev/disk0s3: error: no primary GPT header; run create or recover

Its only a 205MB partition, so its not eating into my disk space, but BootCamp wont run until this partition is removed.

Anybody has any ideas on how to remove this partition?
Given a good set of instructions, I'd be willing to use the terminal or boot into single user mode and work the command line if that is necessary.

Thanks in advance

MBP, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Oct 10, 2008 11:18 PM

Reply
11 replies

Oct 11, 2008 2:40 PM in response to Kappy

I had my fingers crossed that it wouldn't come down to this.

Is there a way to back up my entire current system (applications, prefereneces, documents etc) and then put it on top of a fresh install of Leopard so that I can continue as if nothing happened.

I dont have an external hard-drive that I can use with time-machine.
I was thinking along the lines of using Carbon Copy Cloner/SuperDuper or something similar. What sort of back-up would I have to make and how would I go about replacing the clean installation of Leopard?

Thanks again 🙂

Oct 11, 2008 2:57 PM in response to ucx

Well, you need some sort of external drive if you're going to backup the internal drive. You can use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! or the Restore option of Disk Utility to clone the drive, but you have to clone it to an external drive. If you make a bootable backup on an external drive, then boot from the clone you can then repartition and erase the internal drive, then clone back from the external drive.

I cannot delete a LINUX swap partition

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