grub2/coreboot on MacBook Pro
Aaron
Perhaps someone could assist me in getting grub2/coreboot working on
my MacBook Pro. Any Mac is limited to 4 partitions due to something OS
X related with bootcamp, I'm told. I have the EFI partition, OSX,
funtoo (was gentoo), and win7. There is no available partition to
place the grub core on. When running the grub-install script, I was
told that installing to a partition is bad (/dev/sda3) and I tried /
dev/sda also, since refit can pick up legacy bootloaders in the MBR.
Both installations failed, and I had to emerge -C grub && emerge grub-
legacy to get things working again.
Any suggestions? The documentation for grub2 is a bit.. unpolished, it
seems. I couldn't make heads or tails of how to get it installed to
the partition itself, having all the "core" files in /boot on /dev/
sda3.
Thanks!
-Aaron
Daniel Robbins
I have not tried installing on a MacBook Pro, but the steps should be similar to those outlined here in our GPT and GRUB boot guide:
http://www.funtoo.org/en/funtoo/core/partition/
This will explain how to create the dedicated GPT partition. grub-install should detect this partition and install the boot loader core inside it.
-Daniel
Aaron Ten Clay
Daniel,
Thanks for the reply. However, as I noted, only 4 partitions may exist. As all
four partitions exist already, I need to use grub "the old way" by installing
the bootloader to the Linux partition, not to the MBR, and without a dedicated
grub partition. I cannot find any documentation on this method.
Any pointers would be appreciated.
Thanks!
--
Aaron Ten Clay
Jeff Mitchell
> Thanks for the reply. However, as I noted, only 4 partitions may exist. As all
> four partitions exist already, I need to use grub "the old way" by installing
> the bootloader to the Linux partition, not to the MBR, and without a dedicated
> grub partition. I cannot find any documentation on this method.
You ignore Grub's warning and tell it to install to the Linux partition:
/dev/sda3 instead of /dev/sda.
That said, I have a MacBook Pro for work, and I had a triple-boot setup
going for a while. It was extraordinarily fragile. The MBR as seen by
Linux and rEFIt were different, and often "syncing" the MBR with rEFIt
would actually cause the Linux partition to be unbootable, forcing me to
use a boot disk to get back into the Linux partition and manually tweak
the MBR. One lesson I learned from all this is that only Linux (and
maybe Windows) really cares what the MBR says, so don't worry to much
about whether rEFIt thinks things are synced or not.
I'd also find that things like OSX updates causing me to need to
re-bless with rEFIt would often break the Linux partition, forcing me to
break out the boot disk again.
You're pretty much limited to MBR, too, because Apple purposefully
breaks the EFI standard which makes it very difficult to actually use
grub2's efi support. See the excellent article at
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/efi-boot-process.html
There isn't much of a lesson here, other than that triple booting on a
Mac is difficult both on the long and short term mostly because Apple
doesn't actually follow standards. So good luck with that, but due to
the specific problems of that setup and Apple's broken bootloaders,
there's probably not much we can do on this list to help you.
--Jeff