Apple ARM - partitioning - removing macOS
Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2024 9:16 am
Hi.
As some of you know already I've bought MacBook Air M2.
I'm trying to understand the partitioning. I've successfully booted Gentoo live image on this hardware, but I've left around 100GB for macOS... which I don't use at all.
Can I remove macOS, but leave recovery OS there?
I managed to install the minimal UEFI environment via recovery OS using the Asahi Linux script.
I thought if I could just delete the macOS by using apple's (gui) disk manager via recovery OS, and then give all the remaining free space to my Gentoo installation?
EDIT01:
As some of you know already I've bought MacBook Air M2.
I'm trying to understand the partitioning. I've successfully booted Gentoo live image on this hardware, but I've left around 100GB for macOS... which I don't use at all.
Can I remove macOS, but leave recovery OS there?
I managed to install the minimal UEFI environment via recovery OS using the Asahi Linux script.
I thought if I could just delete the macOS by using apple's (gui) disk manager via recovery OS, and then give all the remaining free space to my Gentoo installation?
EDIT01:
- I should NOT use the Apple (gui) disk manager to do anything, but instead Apple's diskutil cli tool.
I'm currently reading https://leo3418.github.io/asahi-wiki-bu ... heatsheet/
Yeah... Apple really didn't make this easy. But at least they didn't forbid from booting other OSes.
... So I will definitely have one EFI partition and one partition dedicated to lvm, so I don't need to worry too much.Warning wrote:Warning: Some of Apple’s tools do not like unsorted partitions in the GPT partition table. Since you need to keep the first and last partition in place, that means most disk management operations from Linux will append partitions to the GPT, and put it out of order. Make sure you fix this. With the fdisk Linux command this can be done with x (go into expert mode) → f (fix partitions order) → r (return to main menu) → w (write changes and exit).
- Well... I got rid of the correct partitions/containers. I left the first, last and the macOS disk image intact. The first and last are essential to boot and to be able to boot into recovery OS. I guess the macOS disk image isn't needed because it contains only the installer.
But at this point the Asahi installed wouldn't continue after the first key press. It complained that the Mac didn't have any bootable macOSes. The thing I just wanted. The Asahi installer needs a macOS to be able to authenticate when modifying some boot parameters, I guess.
Now the question is can I remove the macOS container after I have booted Gentoo live medium? I wish to be able to get along only with the Recovery OS (first and last container/partition).
I'm currently reinstalling macOS... That'll take hours...