My 13" macbook pro 5,5 is currently booting Mac OSX 10.9, Windows 7 32-bit, Ubuntu 13.10, Kali 1.0.5, OpenSuse 13.1, and BackTrack R2. It currently hold two internal hard drives (took out the superdrive) which I have partitioned the first one with OSX and Windows and the second with my linux distros.
I am using this very handy tool called rEFInd... get it, efi?
Anyway, this, in combination with grub2, allows me to boot basically any quantity of operating systems I want to (hdd space limited).
A few things to mention concerning the limitations of mac booting.
Grub is needed as they boot through the legacy method as well as windows. Apple decided to make their macbooks and all successor computers including the iMacs with this thing called a hybrid mbr. This is a terrible and highly unreliable method for having the capability of having a bios-less boot using the mbr as it's primary boot method while still having the capability of efi booting, and even worse you can only have 4 boot entries in the hybrid mbr. Mac, The hybrid mgr was designed solely for the purpose of booting windows since efi is only supported in windows 8 and higher.
Also, typical bios-based usb booting will NOT work... at least on the macbook pro 5,5. I have not tested bios based usb booting on other macs so results may vary. So the solution is to EFI boot your usb distro. Even though bios-based booting is the most common type, EFI booting is quickly taking over and will become the standard in booting any os in the future which makes your mac future-proof when bios-booting becomes outdated.
The following methods have worked for me when installing windows with bootcamp:
In your macintosh operating (whatever it may be), install bootcamp with your choice of windows os. Make sure you have allocated enough space for the windows partition to allow for other linux distributions as they will installed in the windows space. You can actually use bootcamp to install a linux distro, though I have never tried it. Using bootcamp allows the hybrid mbr to function properly with the other linux distros who boot in typical mbr style. Once the installation is complete and you have installed windows, now download and install refind from http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/getting.html
Install from mac using terminal. Reboot twice (this is because of funky mac bios firmware failing to boot the first time, a hard reboot maybe required if it freezes).
Now it's linux time. I like ubuntu and I know it works so we'll be installing this. Make a bootable usb drive with ubuntu installed using these instructions http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-mac-osx
The first installation is always the hardest because we use the installation as the booting point for the rest of the distros because of the hybrid mbr limitation.
More procedures to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment