[SOLVED] Is it safe to remove Apple APFS partition?

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aq74i
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[SOLVED] Is it safe to remove Apple APFS partition?

Post by aq74i »

Hullo,
I installed Linux Mint onto a Macbook13,2 recently; and there's only about 1~2GB of space left on the filesystem.
Is is alright to use [Disks] to delete the Apple APFS, or is it still being used by the computer for something?
If it's okay to delete it, please could you tell me if there's a proper way?
Thank you.

There are now 4 volumes according to [Disks]:
1) EFI System Partition 1 315MB FAT
EFI System
2) Filesystem Partition 2 59GB APFS
Apple APFS
3) Swap Partition 3 4.0 GB Swap
Linux Swap
4) Filesystem Partition 4 188 GB Ext4
Linux Filesystem


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Edit/update:
I opened "Disk", and formatted the partition. Then I tried wiping it.
But it would not merge.
So I tried making the freed space adjacent to the filesystem, by creating a new swap and deleting the swap (which was in between the two).
This made them adjacent, but I could not merge them, whether I left it as "free space", or formatted it as EXT4, mounted or unmounted.
Tried installing GPARTED, but that didn't help.
Eventually decided to boot into recovery mode, and start a clean install of mint from flash drive, wiping the computer's contents as much as possible before manually partitioning according to this site:
https://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu-li ... artitions/
(Might not be a problem for everyone, but for my machine, letting the installer automatically partition everything made the boot drive too small to install some generic kernel thing. Don't really know the specifics, but that was what the error message said, iirc. Sorry, it was 3am and I didn't have a notebook open).
Sorry for the very long text. Just wanted to leave this here in case it helps someone. Sorry and thank you.

tldr:
It is safe to remove the Apple APFS partition from inside Linux Mint, via Disk, on a machine with Linux Mint and MacOS installed on separate partitions.
Safe in the way that removing it doesn't make the computer BSOD, but useless in the sense that there seems to be no way to merge the freed space to the filesystem.
Last edited by LockBot on Thu Nov 30, 2023 11:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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