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Hard disk partitioning for Mac

post #1 of 14
11/14/06 at 11:08pm
Thread Starter 
A friend of mine has requested me to help him put Ubuntu on his old G4 Powerbook (eww ). We've run into a slight problem. Unlike the x86 install CD, the Mac version doesnt come with a tool to re-size the partitions on a Mac disk. Is there any free program that will allow him to re-size the disk? He doesnt want to nuke his OSX install.
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post #2 of 14
11/14/06 at 11:17pm
I don't know how old this is, but it looks like it might help:
http://modular.math.washington.edu/macbook/
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post #3 of 14
11/14/06 at 11:27pm
Thread Starter 
Thanks for the help, but that tutorial involves deleting the disk.
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post #4 of 14
11/15/06 at 12:41am
I am not sure if gparted is an option or not. I would imagine if it is you would have to have HPFS support compiled on whatever kernel you ran it on, which tends to not be the default.

Seablade
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post #5 of 14
11/15/06 at 1:27am
yeah, hpfs support is really far from being a linux standard, even less so than ntfs, so i think nuking osx is pretty much required.

UNLESS...you use the osx dvd "disk utility" or whatever the hell its called to resize and repartition junk
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post #6 of 14
11/15/06 at 1:38am
Thread Starter 
I thought the disk utility would nuke the disk. I didnt know it could resize existing partitions.
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post #7 of 14
11/15/06 at 8:22am
Actually ABF, HPFS is well supported in linux, I have used it often, and is much better supported than NTFS. The thing is not many people compile it into their kernels.

Seablade
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post #8 of 14
11/15/06 at 7:29pm
whatever....one of those things i ALWAYS exclude from my custom kernels
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post #9 of 14
11/15/06 at 8:34pm
Strangely I always include it in module form as I am often working with Macs. Works great for me, and for a mac system may be the best choice for a dual boot partition that needs to be read from both, though there are ext drivers for the mac I believe.

Seablade
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post #10 of 14
11/16/06 at 12:07am
Thread Starter 
So to sum up, the Disk Utility DVD will allow me to change the size of the partition without deleting anything thats already on the HDD, correct?
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post #11 of 14
11/16/06 at 12:21am
Im afraid I don't know that one for certain, all I could do at this point would be to Google to give you an answer as I am not even sure where my OS disks for my powerbook are

Seablade
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post #12 of 14
11/16/06 at 12:26am
Dang I do to much for my own good at times... have a couple of links for reading, they should give you a good starting point of things to look at.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=89960

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_hfsplus


Note the dates on these, the gentoo one should be fairly up to date(Yea for Wikis) and the Ubuntu one should give you a good starting point for looking at doing an Ubuntu install.

I will say the live cd of dapper ran pretty well, though you will need to set up the reverse engineered broadcom driver for the airport to work, and that was tricky last I looked, though possible. At any rate, have fun.

Seablade
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post #13 of 14
11/16/06 at 12:35am
Thread Starter 
Thanks a lot. I googled and didnt find those. Maybe I wanst using the right terms. I'll try this out on Friday most likely. I'll let y'all know how it goes
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post #14 of 14
12/8/06 at 4:03pm
Thread Starter 
Ok, it works!! I managed to use Gparted from the Ubuntu CD to repartition his disk on a command line level. I didnt have much time to try much else beyond give him a basic run-down of Ubuntu's workings. I'll update later when I have a chance to help him get more stuff working.

He he, In the words of my friends who witnessed this "OH MY GOD!! YOU DE-MACED A MAC!!!"
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