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Long story short I've got an ancient (2009 era) macbook pro that I've been dual-booting windows and OSX for years. Light duty thing, happily chugging along. Bunch of upgrades over the years, new batter and ram and ssd etc. Over thanksgiving, like an idiot, I got bored and decided to hollow some HD space out of the windows side of things to throw a lightweight version of linux on there. I figured if I could get that working it might be a good way to move on to an actually updated OS. Well, in the process I hosed up my boot manager. Not a huge issue, I've got backups of everything, and it even gave me the push I needed to finally upgrade from 10.11 to a tweaked (and technically unsupported by the hardware) version of 10.13. Everything got flattened down to a single partition, with just macOS 10.13 on it. BUT, it doesn't boot right. I have to hold alt to get the boot manager open, and it shows a few partitions that aren't there any more. I'm also completely unable to get windows to install. I've tried the partition managers in both various OSX/MacOS bootable thumb drives and Win7 and Win10 thumb drives to nuke the poo poo out of it, but they won't actually completely flatten the drive. Can't completely blow out all partitions and do a full wipe, and I assume this is related to me not being able to get the boot manager working right. The OSX utilities say that they can't unmount dev0 which is weird, while the windows one just throws an unspecific error. Googling around apparently this is a thing that would happen with the older intel macs. Most of the suggestions involved forcing a de-mount via terminal, but that isn't working for me either. edit: plus a few suggestions to just swap in a new drive. Which, at that point I can just live with only having the one OS and holding an extra button to boot. Any suggestions on a bootable utility that I could use to completely flatten out this drive so I can rebuild? I'm not opposed to yanking it and putting it in a desktop if it's something that needs to happen, but frankly I'd prefer to avoid opening up this laptop if possible. Half laziness, half not trusting that I'll get the bottom plate back on right because of a decade's worth of dents. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Nov 29, 2022 |
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Nov 29, 2022 15:22
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Whenever I've had weird partitioning issues, like messing around with drive overlays or other resizing shenanigans, my fallback is to use a linux boot environment from USB/CD. From there I use dd to write zeroes to the physical disk. No reason to do the whole disk, just write a few tens of megabytes over it so you wipe out the start of the drive. Then your OS install will see it as completely unpartitioned and you can set it up however you want. Something like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" (where /dev/sda is your hard drive. You can get a list of devices with "fdisk -l" and you want the whole drive, not a partition so don't go /dev/sda1 or anything.) Having said all that, an easier option might be to boot it with DBAN and do the same thing, though. https://dban.org/ Same as above, no need to wipe the entire drive, just the first bit to kill all the partitioning info. Just to be clear, this will kill the disk in question - none of your partitions on it will work afterwards. You'll need to repartition and reload all your OSes.
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Nov 30, 2022 10:36
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Gromit posted:Whenever I've had weird partitioning issues, like messing around with drive overlays or other resizing shenanigans, my fallback is to use a linux boot environment from USB/CD. From there I use dd to write zeroes to the physical disk. No reason to do the whole disk, just write a few tens of megabytes over it so you wipe out the start of the drive. Then your OS install will see it as completely unpartitioned and you can set it up however you want. Thanks I'll give that a shot. And yeah, I'm 100% expecting full data loss. Everything is backed up in preparation for that.
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Nov 30, 2022 14:16
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