[larrinski]

I was installing iscroll2 and went to reboot. My ibook freaked out as I had dual boot with kubuntu and os x. It left me a blank screen. I figured that my ibook was trying to rewrite the mouse driver and it messed up my startup. So I started up from my Tiger DVD, and erased the 2 linux partitions and rebooted. That worked to get my back into OSX, however now I have 2 old linux partitions reformatted for osx. I would like to merge them together. As Kubuntu couldn't see my airport extreme card anyway, I don't need to re-install it. From what I can see, it can't be done, but I thought I would give it one more stab, before I "live with" the new partitions. I know that I could reinstall OS X and do it then, but I would prefer not to have to spend hours reinstalling all my software.

[Detrius]

If you boot into single-user mode, you can use pdisk at the command line to rewrite the partition table by hand. ( This is one of those methods that you shouldn't use if you can't figure it out yourself.)

It's basically just a matter of rewriting the partition table to say that the two partitions are now one (this is only possible if they are contiguous). Apple's Disk Utility program won't do this. pdisk can't do this when OS X is fully booted from the drive (it can do it on non-boot drives). Since I've used pdisk since MkLinux, I haven't looked into any of the other utilities.

ps. if you do want to use pdisk for the first time, you should back up your data.

[Tomchu]

How will that keep filesystem consistency anywhere close to usable?

Just merging the two partitions in the partition table will create a situation where the system thinks there's one partition, but in fact there are two seperate filesystems in the one partition. Everything I've ever learned about partitions and filesystems screams "DATA LOSS".

[mactropolis]

no. when you use pdisk to merge the two partitions you then reboot and OS X will say it found an unrecognized partition and wil lask you to format it. When Disk Utility pops up and your format it, it will be one file system and 2 volumes would indeed relaly become 1.

let us know how it goes.

[Dr.Michael]

If I were you I wouldn"t experiment with repartioning without a bootable backup, for example on a firewire drive.

But if you have a backup drive, you can just make a backup, repartition and replay the backup. The backup can be done during the day (when you are at work), the repartitioning needs you for 2 minutes while the replay can be done over night.

This is clean and without risk.

[Detrius]

Originally Posted by Tomchu

How will that keep filesystem consistency anywhere close to usable?

Just merging the two partitions in the partition table will create a situation where the system thinks there's one partition, but in fact there are two seperate filesystems in the one partition. Everything I've ever learned about partitions and filesystems screams "DATA LOSS".

You would absolutely lose the data on the two volumes the you delete. However, any other volumes that are defined in the partition table would not be affected (if done correctly).

[larrinski]

I have been looking into pdisk. I am not too comfortable yet to "give it a go" but I can live with the other partitions until I figure it out. The man page has lots of info. I will post after I figure it out. Any links to pdisk help topics/urls would be helpful. By the way I am not worried about any data on the old partitions. I just want to erase the old ones and make one larger one. The 1st of the old partitions is about 5 Gb and the 2nd one is about 290Mb. The small one is pretty useless as is...My OSX partitiions is higher up the map.

[Tomchu]

Originally Posted by Detrius

You would absolutely lose the data on the two volumes the you delete. However, any other volumes that are defined in the partition table would not be affected (if done correctly).

Ohhh okay. See, I misunderstood what the question was ...

I thought the poster was asking about merging two partitions and the data in them.