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I have a Macbook where I have a dual boot setup with elementary OS 5 Hera and macOS. The original installation was from scratch with a new SSD where I partitioned and installed both successfully. I now want to upgrade from Hera/5 to Odin/6 on the Linux partitions.

I created a bootable USB using balena Etcher and successfully booted to demo mode. If I boot to install mode and choose Custom Install, I can select the Linux partitions to use but the EFI partition displays as "too small".

Since major upgrades, like 5 to 6, require backing up data and doing a full install, how does this happen on existing dual boot setups? (I see another user has a similar question from a month ago that remains unanswered.) I swear I did not have this problem when working with Ubuntu years back. But, I might have been using a virtual machine so I could do an all-or-nothing install.

Do I have to do partition/erase work on the Mac side in Disk Utility first or use the Recovery HD for some work? How can I get this done?

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Did you set up a dedicated partition for /home ? In which case you can keep it and just resize/recreate other linux partitions from live usb install instead of just reusing the previous ones.

The install custom partitioning tool would be the same as using Mac tools, so those are not necessary, unless you feel more confident using them to prepare the partitions.

As for the Efi part, I think I eventually used Grub Customizer to have the correct booting on my Imac.

Of course you want to make sure you don't erase the Mac part, and that you have all your data backed up before starting the project :P

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    With the upgrade to 6, I was hoping to simply reinstall over the '/' and '/home' partitions. It wouldn't let me do that. So, I thought that I would try to install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS since eOS 6/Odin is based on that. I downloaded the ISO, created an installer USB with balena Etcher and started an install. I deleted the two Linux partitions and then installed. It worked. I had to reinstall rEFInd in Linux and am now back to what I want. It is a learning machine so all is good.
    – pjcoxgcsyd
    Mar 17, 2022 at 3:44
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    After this work, I did more research and found a page that suggested an EFI/boot partition of 300 MB. My partition was only 209 MB. I am guessing that is why I saw the "too small" alert when attempting my upgrade from eOS 5 to 6.
    – pjcoxgcsyd
    Mar 18, 2022 at 23:42
  • ubuntubuzz.com/2021/09/…
    – pjcoxgcsyd
    Mar 18, 2022 at 23:43

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