I decided that I wanted to take Arch for a spin for the next week or so (I've had Ubuntu installed for a while) and so I thought the logical thing to do was to erase my partitions and start over with a new live cd...
Well.. that didn't work. I tried to do it from Disk Utility in OS X which succeeded in deleting most everything... EXCEPT grub is still in the mbr (or whatever it runs from through rEFIt). But all I see when I start up in the non-OS X partition is:
Code:
GRUB
At any rate, no Live CDs work, I can't delete the partitions from OS X (including after booting up from the OS X Install disk).
If I hit F1 I can get the "grub>" prompt. But I can't figure out how to launch a live cd. To my knowlege, there's not a "bios" for rEFIt where I can force it to boot from CD, is there?
I have OS X, Ubuntu 10 x64 and Windows 7 x64 installed on my Macbook Pro new unibody. Right now when I choose Windows or Linux in the rEFIt boot menu both options take me to the GRUB menu, and I can boot everything but it's a bit redundant and annoying.
First up, assume i know nothing about computers. I have a MBP 5,5, and choosing the logo for windows brings up the grub menu, as does choosing ubuntu's logo. I've read a lot saying i need to install GRUB natively under ubuntu, but I've had no luck doing so. can anyone essentially walk me through this step by step? or offer alternatives?
This seems to be a variant of a problem many people have had, but after several hours trawling through various forums, I haven't seen a reliable match for my situation.In brief:Adding a third boot partition (of Ubuntu) to my existing dual boot of OSX 10.6 and Windows 7 seems to have crippled the Windows boot from working, because Grub apparently takes over the process. Yet Grub does *not* appear to be on the Windows partition.
More verbose:I have an older MacBook Pro (3.1, running Snow Leopard) that I recently refitted with a new 240GB SSD HD. With the extra space (it was previously only 120GB) I decided to add a dual boot with Windows 7 using bootcamp. This all went swimmingly well.Encouraged, I decided to follow this Lifehacker article's suggestion and triple-boot the machine with Ubuntu (I'd never used Linux before):So I now have the nice rEFIt boot partition selection screen, and, indeed, I'm up and running in Ubuntu, and enjoying it.
Only one problem: I can't get into Windows any more. If I try to go in through rEFIt *or* by holding down OPT at startup and selecting the windows partition directly, the result is the same: I get thrown into Grub's selector, and selecting the Windows partition from there leads to an error message and a dead end.Having read through numerous postings, I get the impression that Grub is doing something or living somewhere that it ought not to be, but in most cases I've seen, people had accidentally installed Grub onto the Windows partition (or indeed onto EVERY partition). So far as I can tell, this isn't the case with me. Here's my boot summary:
Code: Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010 ============================= Boot Info Summary: ==============================
I'm not the world's biggest fan of rEFIt to be perfectly honest. It doesn't allow me to customize the menu, set a default, etc. I'd rather boot exclusively using grub-efi. Not just that, I'd prefer to be able to do so without needing an hfs+ volume to bless it onto. edit: I can now see that Elv117 has asked this recently. I shall leave this post here in the hopes that someone knowledgable runs across it and not the one further down the page. Also, I'll probably try working through the tutorial to see if I can manage it. I need to evaluate if I really need OS X at all on my MacBook. I think it would be neat to have GPT/Grub2/MacOSX/Ubuntu/Win7 working properly, the way a "modern" computer ought to. Reverting to MBR is just throwing in the towel.
I have installed Kubuntu (10.10) on top of OSX (10.6) on my MacBook (7.1). When I start the computer, rEFIt asks me if I want to boot on OSX or Linux. When a USB key is plugged in and bootable, rEFIt also asks me if I want to boot on it. However, if I select the USB key, rEFIt still boots Linux on my HDD! What did I wrong?
My friend has an older Macbook Pro (circa 2006) and she installed Ubuntu 11.04 on it but the Appleloader wouldn't boot it directly (to boot to ubuntu I had to use super grub disk 2 to load grub2). I never got it to work correctly. She just updated rEFIt and it displays all the icons for windows and linux now, but she can't boot either of them, it just gives her a black screen with a blinking cursor up in the left-hand corner.I suggested the easiest way to fix it would be to wipe everything and start over, but she doesn't want to. I barely know anything about macs and all the triple boot guides I've found are for fresh installs.
I had my MacBook configured with a triple boot (Windows 7, Mac OSX and Ubuntu 10.04). Everything was working perfectly until I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 and screwed everything up haha.
I formated the Ubuntu partition and installed 10.10 on it, but I made the mistake of not selecting the correct place for the boot loader. I went the non confusing way and decided to format the Ubuntu and Windows 7 partition to start all over again.
The problem si this, for some reason rEFIT shows a Linux partition when there isn't any, I just have my HD partitioned like this:
This is what rEFIT shows:
The partitions are empty, I haven't installed any OS yet.
Do you know how can I delete that extra Linux icon?
I have a 5,2 macbook pro, and I use refit to boot my ubuntu partition. I do not have an OSX partition on the local drive at all. The only partitions that are on the drive are the EFI, ubuntu and swap. Refit lives on the EFI dos partition.I am experiencing a very long delay on power-on before the system will load refit (probably 20-30 seconds) Once it loads everything is normal.
I got ReFit installed on my macbook but I get two icons: the apple and a grey windows sign. I want the penguin, so any ideas on how to change the horrendous Windows icon to the cute much-wanted penguin?
would putting ubuntu on an external hard drive and booting it from refit work? and would i was starting up my imac 11,2 my ipod was bootable for some reason?
I've used rEFIt and to create a dual boot system on a new MacBook Pro 7. 1 following the directions in the community forum. I can book ubuntu and mac os x fine. However, the MBR boot table shows an error in the partition map.
[Code]...
How can I fix this, rEFIt and gptsync are unable to repair the MBR error... Will this cause problems (since MBR shows the ubuntu boot partition overlapping the OSX partition)?
I have installed reFIT-based triple boot. Here is the partition scheme:1. GPT Protective Partition (GPT and MFT). Mac OS X (GPT and MFT)3. Windows 7 64-bit C: (GPT and MFT)4. Windows 7 64-bit D: (GPT and MFT)5. Ubuntu 10.04 / (only GPT)6. Ubuntu 10.04 swap (only GPT)Windows only supports MFT and thus sees last two partitions (5 and 6) as unallocated space. Can I somehow make it see these partitions to be able to access files from Ubuntu?P.S. I know this is rather Windows problem, but I don't know any good forums where I can ask that, because mostly on these forums the answer is "Why would you need anything but Windows?".
I have a Macbook 2,1 since 2007. Last week my hard drive just died, so I decided to replace it with a new one, no problems with that. The problem came when I had to install an operative system, because my DVD drive has been broken for a year and a half now. I know we can easily install MacOSX from an external usb drive, but I don't have a big enough pendrive at the moment. So I went for Ubuntu. I have managed to get an Ubuntu 10.10 live usb stick working like charm, if anyone is interested. I just downloaded the latest i386 iso and followed this advice by pxwpxw for the 32bit EFI.
The only thing I had to change in the boot.cfg was the name of the iso and -very important- changed initrd.gz for initrd.lz. The live usb works great. But I decided to do an installation on the hard drive. I installed it using the whole hard drive and didn't get any errors. But when I boot the macbook it doesn't detect anything. I guess I need an EFI bootloader or something to make it work. I've tried to follow this guide but it seems to be intended for someone who already has MacOSX and the Ubuntu installation working. I just want to install a bootloader or whatever I need from the "outside" (from the live usb I'm using). I tried to just throw reFit into the main hard drive's root folder but it doesn't work. I think that maybe creating an HFS+ partition and installing reFit in it may work, but I don't think I can create that kind of partition from the Ubuntu usb and I also need a working MacOSX to run the enable.sh. I've also read of elilo but I've seen that it hasn't been updated for 3 years
I have a Mac Pro 1.1 and am having trouble installing Debian. I installed rEFIt but it won't show my install and live disks at startup. I have very little experience with the command line but would be willing to try. I have installed debian to my pc and used the command line successfully there, but want the OS for my mac.
I've got an old iMac g3 on which I'd like to install Ubuntu Dapper Drake.Here's the problem:I insert the disk in the computer.Keep pressing "C" till this comes out:Quote:"The default option is "live" bla bla bla but in case of problems use "Live video=ofonly"I write "Live".The orange progress bar appears, but the the screen becomes black.I still can hear sounds: the classic ubuntu log-in music, but I can not see anything: I guess the live has started, but the screen is just black.By pressing CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE I'm able to come back to shell.
Once rebooted, I try "Live video=ofonly".Again the orange progress bar, but then this message comes outQuote:"Failed to start the X Server, It is likely that is not set up correctly. Would you like to view the server output to diagnose the problem?"Even if I dont select anything, some random words appear in the screen, too fast for me to read them.Then I'm back to shell.I read here (that the problem is caused by Xorg and that the solution can but editing his configuration by using Quote:sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.confBut I just don't know when to do that: Ubuntu is not installed yet and there is only MacOS 9.2 on that machine.
I was able to make a grub.efi boot loader finally. But in the end it did not make or generate a grub.cfg, so every time i boot using this loader I get the grub bash shell and nothing else. I tried copying the on from my harddrive to the EFI folder on my flash drive but still nothing.
What i did was compile the loader from source using the directions here, then formated a 4 GB flash drive to gpt, and a fat32 File system. Then moved all of the grub items to /efi/grub. Once done i then rebooted, booted to a rEFIt cd and then used it to boot to the USB (the folder is not blessed yet). Then once i got to the loader screen its just a EFI screen, no boot choice Nothing... just a recovery bash. What am i doing wrong... did i do a step wrong, did i compile wrong? What?! could some on PLEASE tell me how to get the EFI grub to make/use a grub.cfg file!
I keep running into things that say "Boot from the live CD" and I'm trying to expand one of my hard drive partitions right now using gparted, and I need to boot from the live cd.... but I can't seem to figure out how to do that.
I am writing in order to find information on making a Live USB with Ubuntu with a Mac. I have a laptop that Im going to install Ubuntu but I cannot use it to make the Live USB for various reasons.
In the past, I used on my laptop the "Unetbootin" software to make a Ubuntu Live USB and it did worked well. Now, I just realized that Unetbootin can only be used with Linux or Windows so I would really appreciate if someone could provide information and maybe name a software that could be useful to me to do this task.
trying to test out ubuntu 10.10 on my G4 mDD 1.25GHZ 2GB RAM and am able to boot the ISO file from disc and then get to the screen where you type in all that live-nosplash stuff and have tried all the diff combos with like video=ofonly and stuff and can't seem to get it to work. I've gotten as far as seeing the purple ubuntu screen with the white dots and then the screen blacks out and then i hear the ubuntu chime.
I'm going to create either a live CD or USB to demo Ubuntu on my Intel Mac Mini. I'd be doing this only to test one piece of software under Linux.
Is it possible to run the software from my live CD or USB just as I would running Linux (thus, without the need for the software to be installed on a HD)? If so, where do I need to save the software file(s) when creating my live CD or USB?
I can't install any flavour of Ubuntu 9.10 onto my new iMac G3. Here are its specs:
iMac G3 New World (Indigo) 350MHz G3 Processor 192MB RAM 6GB Hard Drive Slot Loader (CD only - not DVD) Mac OS 10.3 Panther
The drive does work - I've played music from CDs on it, and it does allow me to view PDF files stored on data CDs. I can even view the Ubuntu CD through the Finder on the desktop. It just really doesn't want to boot from the CD.
I've tried multiple Linux distributions (all of them PPC compatible).
I know, it's a common Problem but I just can get it right. Im pretty new on Linux and some Commands confuses me a lot. Though, I managed to made me a root account to read any files on both HD. But I still cant write on the external HFS+ formatted HD. ReadOnly Filesystem. I cant set up an internet connection in order to install files. Is there some workaround?
MacBook 5.1, Live-CD Ubuntu 9.10, external HD via USB
So I have been testing out the Ubuntu Live CD 10.04 on my PowerBook G4 and most everything seems to be working fine (with the exception of wireless and the dim/brighten buttons.) When connected to the internet via ethernet cable, I was able to download the broadcom hardware (I guess needed to make wireless work??) This is pictured below. However, even after the hardware thing was activated, when I unplugged the ethernet cord and clicked on the icon for wireless internet under wireless, it says, "Device not ready." Can you get wireless to work with the live cd?
First things first, you will need:1GB or larger flash drive rEFIt (Link at the bottom) A linux installation, virtual machine, or live cdA Mac OS X installation/installation disk Administrator permissions gparted (comes on most linux live cd's) hfsplus/hfsprogs for hfs+ support in linux Alright Step one (in linux):Format your USB key with an MBR partiton table. Add an 8MB ext3 partition named "GRUB" for simplicity. Add a 16MB hfs+ partiton. Use the rest of your disk as FAT32. Step two (also in linux):Mount your ext3 GRUB partiton Open terminal and do "sudo grub-install --root-directory=<mountpoint> /dev/myusb", of couse replacing <mountpoint> with the mount point and myusb with the correct sdX. If you get an error saying that there is no bios boot partition (which you shouldn't), open gparted and select the grub partition and select the flag "bios_grub". Close GParted if it is open and reopen it.
Set the boot flag on the GRUB partition. Copy all of the contents of your live cd iso or cd (including the hidden folder ".disk") to your fat partiton. Skip the following steps in the step two if you don't want persistence In terminal create a zero'd out file called casper-rw in the fat partiton with "dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/LIVE/casper-rw". Replace the /media/LIVE with the mountpoint again.
Now type "mkfs.ext4 /path/to/casper-rw" and follow the instructions if there are any Step three (in mac):Open the rEFIt dmg and copy the "efi" folder to the hfs+ partiton. Locate the file called "enable.sh" in the efi folder Open a terminal and type "sudo " and then the path to the enable.sh. (You can find it by dragging the file into the terminal) Step four:Reboot your computer holding the option key Select rEFIt on your USB drive (If it doesn't appear take it out and plug it back in or boot all the way up and then reboot again) Select "Linux on HD" that has a picture of a flash drive on it. You will now be at the GRUB prompt, so type the following:
Code:
root (hd0,3) linux /casper/vmlinuz boot=casper persistent initrd /casper/initrd.lz boot
Of course take out the persistent part if you didn't use the persistence file. [URL]
I presently have an iMac G4/700Mhz machine I want to try Ubuntu on, but I cannot get it to boot using the 10.04 PPC Live CD. I get to the boot prompt, and no matter what I type, the system halts when the screen clears and comes up, and each time it does so, it comes up different colors (I've seen green, red, yellow, and grey so far). I've tried the special boot arguments that apply to this system when you press the TAB key, and all of them end the same way, so I'm at a wee bit of a loss here.
I am using osx on my macbook wanting to create a bootable ubuntu usb pendrive so that i can install ubuntu on my hp laptop. Is anyone aware of any similar tools for osx such as Unetbootin?, or how i can go about creating a bootable live usb.
I'm trying to boot ubuntu10.4 live CD on my new iMac (iMac 11,2, core i3). The screen goes black at start of boot and stays black. The CD stops reading after a few minutes and that's that. Just to see what else doesn't work I tried ubuntu10.10 beta live DVD. That boots the splash screen - already better than 10.4 - and gives the language menu and the boot option. The boot starts and some text scrolls up the screen quickly. Then the screen goes black, etc. Tried to set boot option vga=771 - no good. Boot option nomodeset - no good. Booting suse11.3 live CD also gives scrolling text and a black screen. All these discs worked on my old Mac Mini Solo (2006). Looks like something's different about booting a live CD on the new iMacs. Anyone else trying this?
I have a 20" 2.0 GHz iMac G5 Rev B and I'm trying to boot the live CD on it. I used to have a small ubuntu partition before on this computer, but I repartitioned it to OS X only when I left it as a family computer. I had no problems with it back then (I think it was 10.04). I've tried booting with several options. Booting by typing in live or live-powerpc64 get the computer to a blue screen with the top bar and cursor, before the cursor stops moving, the computer freezes, and the fans kick up to full. Trying with video=ofonly gets the new left bar thingy to show but freezes as soon as I try to click anything.
I have a serious problem! I downloaded and burnt Ubuntu 10.04 and then chose it as start up volume in Snow Leopard's start up disk preference dialogue and although Ubuntu runs successfully from the cd (I'm typing from it now) I can no longer boot into OS X at all.
I have tried all of the different short cuts at boot up to no avail, even trying 2 keyboards. It insists on looking for the Ubuntu disk and if it is not in the drive comes up with an error message stating that a system disk cannot be found.
Is there any kind of tool on Ubuntu that will let me change the start up disc/interact with the Mac's efi settings? I previously had refit installed but this disappeared just before I booted the cd, is it worth using the live cd?
I tried booting from a Tiger dvd but it wouldn't let me do so, it just returned me to the ominous "System disk not found" message.
Does anyone have any kind of idea? Perhaps some kind of shell script that will reinstall refit? I'm guessing that any kind of dvd designed for PC will prob boot, any kind of OS X recovery disk compatible with MBR available?
