[ubuntu-us-ut] macbook partitions

[jtaber]

Christer Edwards wrote:
> On Tue Oct 23, 2007 at 10:52:38PM -0600, jtaber wrote:
>   
>> I'm ready to upgrade my macbook from Feisty to Gutsy - I usually do a 
>> clean install, so now's the time to do any big changes. 
>>
>> I'm currently dual booting and since bootcamp only allows 2 partitions, 
>> I don't have a separate /home  partition  on my linux partition which 
>> stinks since I can't do a clean upgrade or in case something goes wrong. 
>> a) I've read that we don't even need bootcamp - if you're not using it, 
>> how's it done ?
>> b) Can there be 3 partitions ? (I guess there can be since some triple 
>> boot).
>>     
>
> On my machine I didn't use bootcamp (which is not even available anymore
> unless you upgrade to Leopard).  I wiped my machine with gparted and
> killed all the partitions.  I think created the number of partitions I
> wanted to use and re-installed Mac OSX into one of those partitions (I
> used about 10G for OSX).  I then installed Ubuntu to the other few
> partitions (/boot, swap, /, /home) and everything worked fine.  I just
> make sure that anytime I re-install (which happens alot with all the
> testing I do) that I do manual partitioning, and leave the OSX partition
> alone.  It has worked just fine for half-dozen reinstallations at least.
>
> Granted with my solution it wipes everything but I put a lot of thought
> and research into how to do this when I first got the macbook so I
> didn't have anything to lose at the time.  A pound of prevention... ;)
>
> So, again, I've got something like five partitions, and didn't use
> bootcamp.  I did the partitioning, installed OSX, got all the upgrades
> (firmware) to OSX and installed rEFIt as the boot loader, then installed
> Ubuntu makisg sure to leave the OSX partition alone and unused.
>
> Hope that helps a bit,
> Christer
>   

Thks.  It does help.  I see you used rEFIt - thought I would use grub 
but do you think REFIt is easier/better ?.  Did you run GParted from 
inside Ubuntu?  or reboot with CD and do it at time of partitioning step 
?  What did you set partition type to for OSX?     btw not a big deal 
for me since I haven't used osx for anything and I can simply do a new 
backup of the entire /home directory (I had it organized that way from 
other laptops).