Live Puppy CD configured my iMac when all else failed!

[rmcellig]

I have a 24" iMac from 2006. At one point in my life I thought and truly beleived that Macs were the be all and end all of computing and that EVERYONE should have a Mac. That was then.

Here we are 2013. I had formatted my iMac hard drive so that I could dual boot Linux. I had Linux Mint installed and it worked fine. I decided to get rid of Linux and just make this a Mac. I went to the Mac Disk Utility and tried to delete the partitions I set up. No luck so I started from the iMac installer CD, went into Disk Utility. Same thing. Same error. So, I booted with the Ubuntu 11.04 Live CD. It asked me for a username and password. Same thing when booting from a Zorin Lite Live CD. Where is that Puppy Linux 5.2.8 CD, I asked myself.

After booting successfully with Puppy, I launched Gparted and deleted the three partitions that related to linux. There was a swap, the linux mint partition and some other tiny partition. After deleting the partitions SUCCESSFULLY, I rebooted my iMac normally, went back into the disk Utility and extended the size of my iMac partition to it's normal full size.

Mission Accomplished!!!

I use Puppy off and on but on this day, today, I realized how valuable this tiny Linux distro is. In my case, it just worked when I needed it to and to me that means the world.

I hope I have imapcted others with my story who might have a Mac laying around and how Puppy can work for them. Now I can get on with using my iMac which in reality is about 10% of my computer time these days. The other 90% is spent using Linux Lite, Crunchbang and my always trusty Puppy Linux.

[russoodle]

Hello rmcellig,

I have a 20" iMac of around similar vintage, which i partitioned and setup for OSX Snow Leopard + (mostly Puppy) Linux + large data partition, using rEFIt. I absolutely loved my Mac when i decided to completely and permanently ditch M$ crap back in early 2007....however, only a few months later, i met Puppy and was completely seduced! No nasty arbitrary or user-controlling habits, none of the BS that's associated with using either M$ or Apple stuff, just a versatile, well-behaved (in most cases), house-trained little hound!

Since then, i've been predominantly a Puppy user with occasional use of my lovely Mac machine, although i still love the beautiful glass screen and elegantly-integrated hardware.

The time has come though...my daughter made me an offer i couldn't refuse, so now i have to restore the Mac to its former fully-Apple OSX condition to give to her.

I'm grateful for the info in your post, because i don't know if rEFIt will reverse the procedure successfully or if i will, like you, be using Puppy to accomplish this mission... i'll post the results here, anyway..... and thank you

russoodle

[rmcellig]

Nice to hear from you, russoodle!

Let me know how it goes. I'm back to my normal Mac state. I followed the instructions on how to delete refit and now I have my iMac back to normal.

I only use my iMac to watch videos because of the large screen. Do you use puppy lucid 5.2.8?

I always seem to go back to puppy. It's fast and meets all my needs. I do audio recording and editing for my radio show. Puppy works great on my old dell 3000.