Made a mess of things, hope someone can help

So I was attempting to get a dual boot system running on my macbook with osx and linux. Failed miserably--it's just too much of a pain to get any linux distribution working properly on my macbook. Installed rEFIt to get a bootloader screen, etc. etc.

Problem is, I can't seem to remove the 4 linux partitions from the hard drive and put them back with my osx partition. There seems to be 6 partitions on my harddrive, 120 gig osx partiton, 150 or so meg EFI partition it seems, and 4 linux partitions (swap 1 gig, / 250 meg, /boot 2gig, /usr about 30 gig). I can't get rid of the 4 linux partitions--disk utility just says "preparing to remove" forever.

I would even reinstall OS X completely, however, when i put in the 10.5 cd, it still shows 4 partitions (not 6?) and even the os x disc disk utility doesn't seem to want to remove the partitions either.

Anyone have any ideas?

I did the same thing and had to nuke my hard drive to fix it. Run disk utility from the OS X install disk and delete all your partitions then create one single partition to install the OS on. I would also make a time machine back up of your current OS X install so you don't lose all your data. Good luck.

babarnette said:

I did the same thing and had to nuke my hard drive to fix it.

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I wouldn't do that quite yet. Download a bootable disk called Parted Magic Live CD. It will let you repartition your HDD without losing data.

http://partedmagic.com/wiki/PartedMagic.php

Make a bootable CD (I assume you can do that since you're familiar with Linux). After booting the CD, delete the extra partitions you don't need, then resize your OS X partition to fill the unallocated space. Parted Magic can handle all file systems, including HFS+.

Juan Largo said:

I wouldn't do that quite yet. Download a bootable disk called Parted Magic Live CD. It will let you repartition your HDD without losing data.

http://partedmagic.com/wiki/PartedMagic.php

Make a bootable CD (I assume you can do that since you're familiar with Linux). After booting the CD, delete the extra partitions you don't need, then resize your OS X partition to fill the unallocated space. Parted Magic can handle all file systems, including HFS+.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion, however I made the cd and when I go to boot from it--it loads but then randomly freezes/crashes when I'm attempting to repartition. No luck for me I guess :-/. I guess I'll back up and reformat. Several hours down the drain, I guess.