On MacBook the disk cannot be partitioned to install Ubuntu.

Hi,

To address one of your points: if you have a 250GB drive and have some free space then you can back up your data using an external 250GB drive. If you have duplicate data on your drive right now and/or are okay with backing up only some of your data, then you could use a smaller drive... but it's difficult to tell you how small without knowing more details.

You can get an external 500GB drive for under $100. It's usually cheapest to buy a drive and enclosure separately and put them together yourself.

Check the backup by taking the external drive to another computer and making sure that your files open correctly and aren't corrupted. Make sure to do this before you reformat your laptop hard drive!

Good Luck!
-Q

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MactelSupportTeam/AppleIntelInstallation

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook/TripleBoot

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwitchingToUbuntu/FromMacOSX

OK,

I have now backed up my Macbook using Time Machine onto a 150 gb external hard drive.

My problem now is when I go into Disk Utility, the under the ERASE tab, the option to "format volume as mac OS External (Journaled)" is grayed out and will not allow me to do it. How do I sort this?

Also, after formatting hard disk, how do I then restore my information back to the hard disk using what has been backed up onto the external hard drive.

Thyanks

(Sorry I posted the question above, not noticing I was signed in as another person from my house)

OK,

I have now backed up my Macbook using Time Machine onto a 150 gb external hard drive.

My problem now is when I go into Disk Utility, the under the ERASE tab, the option to "format volume as mac OS External (Journaled)" is grayed out and will not allow me to do it. How do I sort this?

Also, after formatting hard disk, how do I then restore my information back to the hard disk using what has been backed up onto the external hard drive.

Thanks

Hey, sorry no-one has been in touch lately. Sometimes it's important to re-post a question to let new people see it as Launchpad only tends to deal with new things as they arrive
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+addquestion

If you are still having trouble with this then i recommend re-posting. Also try booting up from the Ubuntu cd and choose the boot-menu option to "Try Ubuntu without changes" this should get you to a working desktop. Go up to the top taskbar and click on

System - Administration - Partition Editor

And use the linux partition editor called GPartEd (or QtPartEd for Kde environments) to make the new partitions. Alternatively you could use the partition editor that's included in the installer but i prefer having things setup in advance usually, either way is good tho. I really recommend setting up a dual-boot with your existing OS if at all possible. With Mac it's all a bit different from installing on a Windows machine because Ubuntu should be quite happy about using a partition created with Mac, especially a journalised one on a hard-drive - on solid state drives its allegedly worth remaining with non-journalised in order to reduce the number of read/writes but other people say to not worry about that and go ahead with journalised anyway. Someone else was saying that ntfs, the Windows standard one is also journalised so i guess its weakness is in the implementation of that. I would stick with Mac journalised or better still go with linux "ext3" but as a primary partition if possible. Note that the linux partition editor can also make hfs (Mac journalised) and again i would recommend having this as a primary partition. Linux can read Mac partitions and data so i think Ubuntu will only really need the usual 15Gb or so perhaps with a linux-swap partition of about twice your ram, although anything over 1xRam is plenty. I would really recommend also setting up a separate partition for /home to keep all your data and settings safe - this /home partition is the one you may want to have as quite large although if you plan to mainly use data that's on your mac partitions then even this doesn't need to be very large.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)