Ubuntu / Apple :: Throw ReFit Into Main Hard Drive's Root Folder But Doesn't Work
Dec 7, 2010
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
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 installed ubuntu desktop 11.04 on my acer aspire one 751h and found that the wifi didnt work. the netbook remix was the same so i went through all the previous releases up until 8.0.4.4 which worked fine on the live cd. so i tried to install but the installer didnt see my main hard drives only the usb i was using to install. so i tried using wubi installer which only left me with this screen when i tried to load up ubuntu.
I have system that was cloned from another system hence the user was same in both computer. I changed the computer name - to TANU. Then I added another user - BANU. I gave admin rights to second user. Logged out the first user DON- who is now only the desktop user. Before deleting the account through users and groups - I deleted the folder DON from home folder. I restarted the comp. unable to login. I had created automatic login for both users. How to restore the folder DON while using root shell.
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 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.
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 have a 500 gig external usb, and a few 8 gig flash drives. If i copy a file (say a movie or large file) from my primary hard drive (80 gig WD formatted to ext3) to a usb drive it transfers very slowly, about 2 mb/s. But if I copy a file off my secondary internal drive (40 gig seagate formatted to ntfs) it transfers full speed (25-30 mb/s) Its also very slow transfering between internal hard drives (again, no more than 5 mb/s) I checked and as far as i can tell both drives are running in DMA mode. Any reason my primary seems to be causing this bottleneck? it seems to preform fine otherwise (as it is the drive with my ubuntu installation on it)
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?
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?
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 posted this here because I think Linux Mint is based off of Debian, am I wrong? Anyhow I installed mint to a seperate partition next to windows on my computer. I had my external unplugged at the time... It was actually plugged in at my neighbors. They where watching a movie I had on it; anyhow I plugged it back in went to bed woke up and it took out its own partition on the external.
A few weeks back I was trying to install this (alongside windows 7) and no matter what I tried it would not install. I tried both 9.04 32 bit and 9.10 64 bit. Each screen (language, keyboard, etc) took about 20 minutes to load, and when I finally got to the install it always stopped at about 2/3 percent, giving some type of I/O error. No matter how many times i reburned and redownloaded. (old thread if you're curious)
I eventually gave up but then realized I had an old xbox hard drive hooked up that I cannot boot or read or do anything. It was set as hard drive 0 in windows hard drive manager or whatever. So I unplugged it. Now my windows drive is drive 0, and I have a second internal drive.
I finally got back to installing this. I avoided the graphical installer at first because it was so slow, opting for the alternate cd. It went fast but when I tried to partition it was unclear to me which disk i was partitioning. Doesnt matter because when i clicked ok, it froze at 0% for 30 minutes so i had to do a hard restart. Windows ran the disk check, etc, etc, I checked the disk management in windows and it was just a single windows partition as it should be.
So I tried the graphical cd again instead. It goes really fast through the screens now, HOWEVER it will not detect my drive 0 windows drive! Just my second internal drive which of course I can't install on without wiping the entire thing. I have installed kubuntu 9.04 dual booted with windows xp on this exact hard drive, over a year ago successfully, so I don't get it. What do i do??
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've just read this thread: [URL] and the information it seems is a bit out of date and a risk to use. I felt more comfortable with the .gtkrc-2.0 file suggested a few posts in, but it doesn't work, in that it turns the panel to the Raleigh-themed one which we always get when there's some kind of error in a gtkrc file, as those of us that have dabbled in theming will know.
It's comical that this minor but unnecessary eyesore goes back so far and hasn't been dealt with, but is there any new info about this, a new method, for 10.10? I don't want to be doing compiling or to risk messing things up, as has been caused by the directions in the other thread, because I've been experimenting with different distros for two years, just bought a new hard drive, and have settled now.
Maybe someone here knows why the .gtkrc-2.0 file hasn't worked for me? I twigged that the panel (though not the rest of the theme, i.e. in program windows) had turned to Raleigh because of those ugly handles pertaining to the Window List panel applet and the one to the left of the notification area. I used the exact file in that other thread, I tried logging out and in and then rebooting, and I even tried pasting the file's contents into the gtkrc file of the theme I use. If you need to know, I'm using the 'Lush' Metacity window border and the 'Redmond' engine.
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 wanted to install a Linux distro to a flash drive so that I can have a portable OS with all my settings, programs, etc. wherever I go. So I fired up a Linux Mint Live CD and installed Mint to the flash drive, and this seems to work OK. But now, whenever I try to boot up my system normally without the flash drive plugged in, it doesn't seem to work. It basically hangs for a bit, and then I get the following prompt:
However, when I try powering my system up when the USB is plugged into the computer, it gives me an option between using the OS installed on my USB and the OS installed on my HD. Selecting the latter, everything loads up just fine. I'm guessing that installing Mint to the flash drive somehow messed with my native Grub installation.
I have a Ubuntu box with two drives, one of them is where Ubuntu is installed and the other one is where I store all my music, photos and other documents. I recently bought a Mac and I want to be able to access the drive where I have all my documents from my Mac. Is there a way to accomplish this? I've been looking all day for an answer to this but all I can find is how to share a folder instead of a whole drive.
I was looking in the disk utility today, and i was looking in the hard drive formatting section. in the drop down box, i noticed Apple. does that mean that i could format the rest of my hard drive to be OSX compliant?
I have been trying to install centos on my hp servers and when i get to partitions my hard drives the OS does not detect any harddrives. I have 4 scsi drives and i believe a intergrated smart array controller.
I've recently bought the "new" Macbook from Apple. It obviously came with OSX preinstalled. And I'm obviously not satisfied with the way it works, I also need a FAT32 partition so I can share my files between all three OS's. Tricky business. And I thought later on I might try and create me a nice LFS system to learn about Linux and show of to my mates. But doesn't a single hard drive only support up to 4 partitions? So off I went and got Ubuntu running besides Mac. It wasnt recognized by neither the default boot-loader nor rEFIt straight away. I had to hold alt to come up with the special BIOS or something every time I needed to use Ubuntu (always).
I got up to a point where I could run Ubuntu with wireless, sound and pretty much everything working. Until the kernel updates were installed. Somehow I (or maybe it) managed to screw up and booting had become impossible, for it would crash halfway through with kernel errors and other undefined weirdnesses. Meanwhile I had tried installing Windows 7 on a different partition. Which I found to be catastrophic also. I was forced to put up with OSX, which in my opinion is fine at what it does but it doesn't do very much for me. After a couple of tries I had to give up on fiddling with Ubuntu for I needed Windows 7 to run software for school. So my current partition layout looks like this......
I'm on the latest Ubuntu OS on my netbook trying to make a USB Startup Disk. I have a 1GB USB and a 500GB hard drive plugged in to then netbook. I run the USB Startup Disk program, and it tells me I need to format the USB drive. Okay, so I press format, only to realize that I'm formatting the 500GB hard drive.However, when I pressed format it give me an error saying the disk could not be mounted. I did something on Disk Utility and now I have a FAT32 system on the hard drive with nothing in it. Now my ultimate question is, am I able to recover the data that was on the hard drive?The hard drive was formatted in HFS+, it was a Mac-formatted hard drive. Will I need to use a Mac in order to try to restore my files?
I just installed a new hard drive with OS X on my iMac G5 PowerPC. The drive size is 1TB. OS X Leopard is currently only using about 80 gigs of that space. For some reason, at the disk preparation from my live PowerPC Ubuntu install, the entire bar is green with only 8kb of (white) free space. I want to partition the computer to add Ubuntu to it, but I don't want to risk partitioning my hard drive and losing any data affiliated with the current o/s installed on it (OS X Leopard). What is the best way to go about doing this? A manual partition?
I was trying to reformat my Seagate external hard drive and I selected "free Space," in disk utility not realizing that the computer would no longer recognize the device. I'm trying to install Snow Leopard on it so now how do I format it now to the GUID format? I luckily backed up the entire contents of the hard drive (The essential files on it), but what do I do now that the computer doesen't recognize it!?
Just discovered one more thing with my installation. Builtin iSight doesn't work out of the box on Macbook Pro 5.5 as it says on the wiki.Device is not found in either Cheese or Skype.
Recently my laptop broke down and wont start up. I'm currently trying to recover my files to my mac with an IDE to USB cable. It recognized my windows partition fine and I was able to get all my files off of that, but the majority of my stuff is on the ext4 partition that I have on it. Does anyone know how to access the ubuntu partition of this hard drive from my mac?
