Dual boot Mint 19.3 on an iMac

[dorian]

I inherited an iMac (2014) four years ago and installed Mint alongside Apple’s OS. Now I’d like to get rid of all the Apple’s stuff. Is it safe to delete the Hfs partition where MacOS Sierra resides in?
Many thanks for your help.

[easyt50 (Howard)]

Welcome to the Community @dorian. I do not own a iMac. So here is my guess of what would happen.
1 - If you delete the partition, this might cause problems for now the partitions numbers have changed.
2 - If you just re-initialize the partition and use it with Mint, this should be OK. This keep the partitions number the same.
3 - Best option (I believe), is to either re-install Mint or backup & restore Mint to the iMac and do away with the dual boot.
4 - Get some more opinions esp from someone who knows about Apple iMac.
– Good Luck –

[dorian]

Thanks for your reply: I think I’ll go with your suggestion no.2. Before proceeding I’ll take a Timeshift snapshot.

[Akito]

Why do you want to get rid of the Apple stuff? What’s your goal?

[dorian]

'Cause I rarely used it in the past, never now, never in the future.

[Akito]

Well, the reason I ask the question is that if you only don’t want to use it, you may as well go the safest route and just “hide” it by booting into Linux by default. So it would seem like the Apple stuff is not there, without you needing to fiddle around with actually safely deleting it.
If you however still want to get rid of it then in your special case I would clone the entire disk bit by bit, so if anything goes wrong you can safely restore it, anytime.

Cloning Mint 19.2

Do this from your small SSD to your bigger SSD. After that is done, replace the old SSD with the new one and boot the OS, as usual. If it works, boot to gParted, resize the paritition on your new SSD to the size of this SSD and reboot into your own OS again. Now everything should work as expected.

[wgberninghausen (Bill Berninghausen)]

I’ve rehabbed several XP machines to save them from the recycling pile. While Akito’s advice is sensible and prudent, I’ve had success with backing up any data worth saving to a CD or USB and then formatting the hard drive. Just flush it clean. Then install the newest Mint version you can find to a pristine hard drive. The data you backed up can be reloaded into the appropriate folders, if you like. It’s the computer equivalent of a minimalistic house cleaning and may not be for everyone, but the experience of unloading gigabytes of ‘someday’ files is very refreshing!