I think I need to reformat my hard drive

So, I set up a 50g Boot Camp partition to experiment with Linux several months ago. At the time, I was using Snow Leopard. The experiment failed and I wanted to delete the partition, but Boot Camp wouldn't let me.

Boot Camp Assistant cannot be used.
This startup disk is not supported.

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Recently, I decided to upgrade to Lion. That was more successful. Boot Camp still won't let me delete the partition and Disk Utility won't, either (there's no partition tab). When I installed Lion, it warned me that, something to the effect of, because of blah, blah, blah certain things won't work, or something. I'm finding that those certain things are kind of important.

I think I need to erase my hard drive, reinstall Lion and restore my backup, etc., which will hopefully delete the Boot Camp partition in the process.

Also, in addition to my Time Machine backup, I have a SuperDuper! backup. Which backup should I use?

Using the SuperDuper clone may make things worse.

Use the Time Machine backup after erasing and reinstalling Lion. But first make sure you get the hard drive back to one contiguous partition before doing so.

chscag said:

But first make sure you get the hard drive back to one contiguous partition before doing so.

Click to expand...

I definitely want to do that, but I'm not sure when that step happens.

Spang said:

Boot Camp still won't let me delete the partition and Disk Utility won't, either (there's no partition tab).

Click to expand...

No partition tab? Are you sure you have selected the right item? You only see the partition tab if you select the hard drive, NOT the partition. See screen cap below, and please post one of yours if it doesn't jive.

Okay, I see that now. However, it says I need to "use diskutil instead."



I'd like to get rid of all of those "disk" partitions. When I investigated diskutil, it looked like I could potentially type the wrong thing and, for lack of a better term, **** **** up.

Spang said:

Okay, I see that now. However, it says I need to "use diskutil instead."

I'd like to get rid of all of those "disk" partitions. When I investigated diskutil, it looked like I could potentially type the wrong thing and, for lack of a better term, **** **** up.

Click to expand...

That is very odd. Since you have backups, you have nothing to lose. You can try deleting the partitions and re-merging them with diskutil. If it works, you've saved yourself a lot of work. If not, you were going to wipe it anyway. Just be aware of one thing: the partition you have labeled as DISK0S3 is probably NOT the actual partition identifier also. The Lion Recovery Partition is supposed to have that as the partition identifier.

Actually here's a better idea. Make sure you have a current backup, then boot either from the install disc or from a bootable external backup. Run Disk Utility from there and see if you can fix those partitions that way. It you can't, then you are going to have a problem reinstalling regardless and will have no choice but to use diskutil from Terminal.

UPDATE: I was unable to remove the partitions. However, I was able to make a new partition that replaced all of my partitions, and then restore from Time Machine.

However, I was unable to log in because of FileVault. So, I did a fresh install, etc., etc., etc. Now I'd like to restore just my documents, music and photos, but I think FileVault is preventing me from doing that, since I'm unable to access any of that stuff when I enter Time Machine.

Are there any other solutions? I still have that SuperDuper! backup and I'm back to using Snow Leopard for the time being (10.6.8).

P.S. I was able to recover most of my documents from a manual backup and most of my music is backed up via Amazon Cloud.

P.S.S. I'm never using FileVault (or Boot Camp) ever again.

Bootcamp is to install Windows programs. For Linux manually partition and boot from that.