Skip to content

Introduction

This page explains how to remove Linux from your Mac. It shouldn't matter what distro you are using.

Removing Linux partitions

You may want to do this from macOS Recovery as you will be resizing (expanding) your startup disk, although you don't need to.

  1. In macOS open Disk Utility
  2. Click "View" then "Show all devices"
  3. Select your Apple SSD
  4. Click "Partition". If it suggests adding volumes, don't.
  5. Select your Linux partition, and click - to remove it. Your macOS partition should expand to fill the space that Linux was in.
  6. Click apply.
  7. Disk Utility will remove your Linux partition and expand your macOS partition. This may take a while, but do not interrupt this process. While it does this, consider the fact that you didn't need admin to remove your Linux partition.

Removing the Linux boot-loader

If using a separate EFI partition

Follow the same steps to remove the seperate EFI partition as you followed to remove the Linux partition.

If using the EFI partition already available in your Mac.

  1. In macOS run sudo diskutil mount disk0s1, which mounts your EFI System Partition.
  2. There will now be an EFI disk visible in Finder, open it and go into the EFI folder (within the EFI disk).
  3. Remove any folders other than Apple, Boot, or Microsoft.
  4. Enter the Boot folder and remove bootx64.efi.
  5. If you have Windows installed with Bootcamp, Enter Microsoft folder and then the Boot folder inside the Microsoft folder and copy bootmgfw.efi. Paste it in that Boot folder in the EFI folder of the EFI disk from where you had deleted bootx64.efi. Now rename the newly copied bootmgfw.efi to bootx64.efi. Be careful not to delete the Windows bootloader.

Enable Secure Boot (Optional)

  1. Boot to macOS Recovery by holding ⌘-R as you turn your Mac on.
  2. Enable Secure Boot as described here.