Permissions not enabled on disk.

Question

Hello,
I previoiusly had linux installed in parallel to Leopard on my macbook 4,1.  I'm trying to merge all my partitions so I can reinstall Leopard in as large a space as possible, but the partition that was used as the swap returns error 9973 (Permissions not enabled) whenever I try to do anything with diskutil.  The partition mounts, but doesn't show up in my Volumes directory, so I can't use vsdbutil or chmod.  Here's a layout of my drive:
#:         TYPE                               NAME                   SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                                *149.1 Gi   disk0
   1:      EFI                                                               200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:      Apple_HFS                       Macintosh HD        123.6 Gi   disk0s2
   3:      Apple_HFS                       Linux HD                 23.3 Gi    disk0s4
   4:      Linux Swap  <---- Problem!                                 1.9 Gi     disk0s3
Any suggestions for fixing this? 
Thanks,
Jeremy

Answer 1

Hi BDAqua,
Thanks for the suggestion, it wasn't my final solution, but it did something very interesting.
chown root /dev/disk0s3 seemed to execute but I couldn't run chmod on it.  I tried erasing the partition to FAT32 after running chown and instead of displaying error 9973 (Permissions not enabled) it appeared to perform the erase without being able to mount the volume afterwards.  I checked things over with diskutil list and it still listed the partition as being the linux swap.  Only now do I realize that I should have tried running vsdbutil after chown to see if that would have worked.
My fix was to boot from the Ubuntu install cd and select "Try Ubuntu without installing" from the menu that came up.  Once it was up and running I used the GParted Partition Manager to modify my drive.  Much to my surprise, GParted didn't list the linux swap partition, but rather the name and format I applied after running chown root /dev/disk0s3.  I'm still not sure why diskutil didn't list the change after I erased but I suspect it had something to do with the volume failing to mount after the erase.  From here it was a simple matter to delete all unwanted partitions and resize the one for Mac OS X.
I should add that I tried GParted Partition Manager because I read a post that it could easily deal with Linux Swap partitions.  Here's the post: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1748051?start=0&tstart=0
Thanks for the help,
Jeremy