[Updated] How to create a live USB with or without persistence for mac and pc

[zasf]

Sorry I had no time to update you guys on this topic.

I got this working buy installing rEFIt on my macbookpro, formatting a usb stick with a single ext3 partition and bootstrapping maverick into it.

I actually don't know exactly why it works this way, further investigation is needed but I had really little time to play with it. I also noticed that grub is not able to boot with standard grub config (ie the one that gets autogenerated when doing 'update-grub') but works with

root (hd0,1)
linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb1 ro single
initrd /initrd.img
boot

I read somewhere that rEFIt or the mac itself swaps some drives at during the boot, therefore the root command refers to the first hard disk, while the linux command to the second

More details this wiki page about debootstrapping maverick:

If it works for you too or something is not clear, keep posting here

[BMacK1311]

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[BMacK1311]

I get really far with this tutorial:

I plug in my flash drive, and when I hold down Alt/Option on boot, I'm presented with Macintosh HD and rEFIt. When I click rEFIt, I'm then asked to:
1 - Boot Mac OSX from Macintosh HD
2 - Boot Linux from GRUB
3 - Boot Linux from

As well as with buttons for the standard EFI Shell, Partitioning Tool, Shut Down, and Restart.

Point is, I can't boot Linux from any of the options.
When I click option 2, it eventually loads a page that says that Macs don't boot Legacy OSes very well.
When I click option 3, I'm given a small yellow and black square that doesn't go away unless I manually reboot.
I'm glad that rEFIt is showing up from the flash drive at the very least, but I don't know why Linux isn't booting and how to get it working.

Help?!?!?


**EDIT: If I boot this on the latest generation macbook pro, option two eventually brings be to the grub shell, but then tells me that root (hd0,3) doesn't exist...

I'm at this point too. I get the "macbooks do not boot legacy oses very well..

[ElevatorHappyFun]

I ran into a snag. In 'Part 1' step three asks you to make a '16MB hfs+' partition. There is no option for that. Is hfs+ called anything else? I successfully made the previous '8MB ext3' partition with no problems. I was using the Live CD option of 10.10.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in Advance,
Russ K.

[speedskater114]

I ran into a snag. In 'Part 1' step three asks you to make a '16MB hfs+' partition. There is no option for that. Is hfs+ called anything else? I successfully made the previous '8MB ext3' partition with no problems. I was using the Live CD option of 10.10.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in Advance,
Russ K.

Make sure you've installed the hfsplus, hfsutils, and hfsprogs packages. For the first two, you can install via the terminal (sudo apt-get install hfsprogs or hfsplus), but for the third, do a quick google and download it manually. Then when you open up gparted and try to create a new partition you should have that option.

[ipatch]

Hey, Neds, appreciate the tutorial as I know how tedious it can be to put something like this together. I have a few suggestions that I will include below in the text for the tutorial that could probably add some clarity. Also, I did not see anyone reply in this thread stating that the tutorial worked for them, so I am little curious as to how many people got this working. I worked through this tutorial myself, and I got stuck at the same point that a few people stated earlier in the thread. When I booted my system holding down the "option/alt" key I was presented with the choice of rEFIt loaded on the internal drive on my computer, and the rEFIt loaded on the USB SD card. When I loaded the rEFIt on the SD card, and then selected the Linux option from the FAT32 partiton I got the following error:

Error Message:

The firmware refused to boot from the selected volume.  Note that external hard drives are not well supported by Apple's firmware for legacy OS booting

[Updated - by ipatch 3FEB11] How to create a live USB with or without persistence for mac and pc

Requirments:

• 1GB or larger flash drive
• rEFIt (Link at bottom)
• A linux installation, virtual machine, or live cd
• A Mac OS X installation/installation disk
• Administrator permissions
• gparted (comes on most linux live cd's)
• hfsplus/hfsprogs for hfs+ support in linux

Step One (perform the following tasks in a Linux environment):
*The following steps are easily performed using a GParted Live CD through Virtualbox.

1. Format your USB key with an MBR partiton table.
2. Add an 8MB ext3 partition named "GRUB" for simplicity.
3. Add a 16MB hfs+ partiton.
4. Use the rest of your disk as FAT32.

Step Two (Linux environment):

1. Mount your ext3 GRUB partiton
2. 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.
3. 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".
4. Close GParted if it is open and reopen it.
5. Set the boot flag on the GRUB partition.
6. Copy all of the contents of your live cd iso or cd (including the hidden folder ".disk") to your fat partiton.

Optional Steps: Enabling persestance support on Live USB

1. 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.
2. Now type "mkfs.ext4 /path/to/casper-rw" and follow the instructions if there are any

Step Three (Mac OS X):

1. Open the rEFIt dmg and copy the "efi" folder to the hfs+ partiton.
2. Locate the file called "enable.sh" in the efi folder
3. Open a terminal and type "sudo /path/to/enable.sh " (You can find it by dragging enable.sh into the terminal)

Step Four:

1. Reboot your computer holding the option/alt key.
2. 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)
3. Select "Linux on HD" that has a picture of a flash drive on it.
4. You will now be at the GRUB prompt, so type the following:

   root (hd0,3)
   linux /casper/vmlinuz boot=casper persistent
   initrd /casper/initrd.lz
   boot

   Note: Take out the persistent part if you didn't use the persistence file.

LINKS:
rEFIt: http://refit.sourceforge.net/
Ubuntu live cd: http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download
GParted: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
VirtualBox: http://www.virtualbox.org/
Explanation of mounting a partition: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_singl...tion/#mounting

[BMacK1311]

I was able to test this on 2 more macbooks. The first was a santa rosa (3:1?) and one other was older and one was newer (apologize for not knowing the versions...)

On both I ran into the same problem. I choose refit, then Linux on HD, and when it loads into grub I see:

error: no such device: ab0c38dc-f184-4db3-bdcf-649565e779cae.
grub rescue> _

I figure this is the grub prompt referred to in the last step of the tut, so I enter:

root (hd0, 3)

and it spits back:

unknown command 'root'

I figure something went wrong at the grub install step earlier in the tutorial, but I don't know what.

[BMacK1311]

Success!

I had installed GRUB at a non-existent mount point. I modified the tutorial to show what I did, but this means that the tutorial was 100% correct and works - I interpreted it incorrectly. Now to test on my other 2 test MacBook Pro's. Thanks Neds.

This is an updated version of my tutorial.

First things first, you will need:

• 1GB or larger flash drive
• rEFIt (Link at the bottom)
• A linux installation, virtual machine, or live cd
• A 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):

1. Format your USB key with an MBR partiton table.
2. Add an 8MB ext3 partition named "GRUB" for simplicity.
3. Add a 16MB hfs+ partiton.
4. Use the rest of your disk as FAT32.

Step two (also in linux):

1. Mount your ext3 GRUB partiton
2. Open terminal and do "sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/GRUB /dev/sdb" - Modification by BMacK1311: the tut says to name the partition GRUB, making the mount point /media/GRUB at /dev/sdb
3. 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".
4. Close GParted if it is open and reopen it.
5. Set the boot flag on the GRUB partition.
6. Copy all of the contents of your live cd iso or cd (including the hidden folder ".disk") to your fat partiton.
7. Skip the following steps in the step two if you don't want persistence
8. 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.
9. Now type "mkfs.ext4 /path/to/casper-rw" and follow the instructions if there are any

Step three (in mac):

1. Open the rEFIt dmg and copy the "efi" folder to the hfs+ partiton.
2. Locate the file called "enable.sh" in the efi folder
3. 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:

1. Reboot your computer holding the option key
2. 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)
3. Select "Linux on HD" that has a picture of a flash drive on it.
4. You will now be at the GRUB prompt, so type the following:

   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.

LINKS
rEFIt: http://refit.sourceforge.net/
Ubuntu live cd: http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download

[ipatch]

I was able to test this on 2 more macbooks. The first was a santa rosa (3:1?) and one other was older and one was newer (apologize for not knowing

The Santa Rosa a la MacBook Pro 3,1 is the same machine I tried performing this tutorial on with no luck.

Here is the output after I installed Grub to the GRUB partition of the SD card. Do you see any issues with this install?

[BMacK1311]

I'm probably not qualified to answer that question, but our Apple guy says this method probably will not work for the 3,1. I am now trying to use the grub efi loader for it. If that doesn't work, I'm going to try elilo. Grub testing on macbooks can be found at Testing on MacBook Pro. I'm trying to follow the guide but I'm very new to this and I'm not sure which text to replace with which paths or mount points - the same problem I ran into with this tutorial.