Monadnock is my MacBook Pro. If you look in the archives, you will find a post where I had tried to turn my laptop computer into a triple-booting workstation: OS X, Linux and Windows XP. The Windows XP installation failed, not surprisingly, but I really didn’t care much b/c I am also running WinXP from within two VMware Fusion virtual machines: one for IE7 browser compatibility test and another for *ick* IE6 browser compatibility testing.

I did care, however, a little bit b/c the failed installation left a 20GB unusable dead zone partition on my hard drive. Yesterday, I decided to clean house and embark on another project. I decided to blow away the dead zone and the Kubuntu Linux partition that I haven’t used since I installed it and instead install a different leaner meaner ArchLinux distro in a smaller Linux partition and create a shared HFS+ partition that both operating systems can use. It’s a simple enough project really, a 6 or so on the Geek Difficulty Scale.

Except, that Apple’s Disk Utility application kept crashing whenever I tried to repartition the drive. Using their lower-level diskutil utility failed as well. Evidently, the failed WinXP installation really hosed the dead zone partition information.

After spending last night backing up all of my OS X data (code, music, photos, etc.) to my 1.5TB disk array, I came into work today and booted my laptop to the Kubuntu Linux CD and essentially reinstalled Linux. By reinstalling Linux, I can use their disk partitioning tool and repartition the drive the way I want to… assuming that the dead zone could be read. Long story short: the Linux partitioning tool was able to read and delete the dead zone partition. I did have to create a large Linux partition out of the dead zone and the original smaller Linux partition and finish the install, but it was time well spent to get my hard drive back in working order. After Linux installed, I rebooted to OS X, ran Disk Utility and removed Linux. My hard drive is back to being one huge 250GB HFS+ partition.

I’ll play with ArchLinux later…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 11:08 am and is filed under Hackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.