Lucid: GRUB breaks EFI

[jacques4x4]

Zannek I am a little unclear as to what you did to resolve this.

Resetting your pram? (parameter random access memory)???

Could you clarify?

thanks

[Zannek]

To reset PRAM (on an Intel machine) hold down Command+Alt+P+R on startup. It seemed to work sporadically however, as after booting back into OS X, the problem re-appeared. I have a feeling that GRUB did very much bork my EFI partition, but hopefully I can restore it somehow.

[jacques4x4]

I have a feeling that GRUB did very much bork my EFI partition, but hopefully I can restore it somehow.

It totaled mine.. I had to boot with the OSX install disk, use the disk utility to format the drive using the GUID partition table..

Then, thank goodness for the Time Machine, I restored the OS and my data..

I believe this is the only way back

[Zannek]

It totaled mine.. I had to boot with the OSX install disk, use the disk utility to format the drive using the GUID partition table..

Then, thank goodness for the Time Machine, I restored the OS and my data..

I believe this is the only way back

That's probably a good idea. I'll try it when I get the time. Thanks.

[Nikos.Alexandris]

I did exactly what Jacques4x4 did, and there is no /dev/sd3 option..

WHAT CAN WE DO??

I've seen this when I installed Kubuntu lately. I just let it install grub at /dev/sda and it worked!

Of course you should have a backup of everything (don't you?) before trying it out. Be warned that I really have no idea why it did not work (with the Ubuntu installer) pointing at /dev/sda3.

Regards

[pafufta503]

i need a bit of clarification. what i've gathered is, the installation will cause damage to the EFI partition? is this because you are installing it to the same harddrive as OS X? if i install everything to a seperate hard drive, will grub still bork things up?

the overriding question is, is it safe for me to install lucid on my in macpro, or will it break my boot process?

[gdgtfiend]

i need a bit of clarification. what i've gathered is, the installation will cause damage to the EFI partition? is this because you are installing it to the same harddrive as OS X? if i install everything to a seperate hard drive, will grub still bork things up?

the overriding question is, is it safe for me to install lucid on my in macpro, or will it break my boot process?

I would wait to install 10.04 until we know that it is 100% safe. If there is a NEW install article on the Mactel Wiki you can try to do that.

As of now it is not particularly safe. So if you do it, BACK UP YOUR HDD!

If anyone has any info on the subject please write back. You can also msg me on irc @ n06 on freenode.

Speaking of irc, is anyone interested in oping a mactel support irc? I don't have the expertise to do it, but it would be nice to have one.

EDIT: I just found this info, I'm not very good in command line, so I thought someone who has some chops might try this http://www.ehmac.ca/anything-mac/432...operation.html


Thanks,
-gdgtfiend

[jacques4x4]

EDIT: I just found this info, I'm not very good in command line, so I thought someone who has some chops might try this http://www.ehmac.ca/anything-mac/432...operation.html

Wow... Zannek this could potentially save you a lot of time..

[bean123]

Yeah, I have seen this before, grub2 seems to mess up GPT partition when running from the installer. One solution is to skip the boot loader step. After reboot, use live CD to open a rescue shell on the root device, and run this manually:

grub-install --force /dev/sda
update-grub

[thomas.clark]

Ugh. For a first-ever ubuntu install, this was a nasty surprise.

I don't know squat about any of this, but I managed to trick my system, I think, into booting back into OS X.

Not only did I have to hold down alt, but my Mac HD wasn't even an option to select as a Startup disk. So, having booted into OS X via the hold alt method, I then set the Startup Disk to network. I then tried to reboot without my network cable plugged in, which brought up the spinning earth as it tried to boot via the network, and eventually defaulted into OS X. I'd accidentally done this once before for another reason, and found that it did successfully bring back the Mac HD as an option for Startup Disk. I selected it to rebless, then dumped all the rEFIt folders. Now I'm booting directly into OS X.

I haven't a clue what GRUB is or what it's doing or not doing in my EFI partition, but I'm hoping I don't find out. Should have stopped and backtracked when there was no sda3 option for the boot loader. Darn impatience.

In the meantime I'm going to retry with 9.04. I do want to get into this ubuntu thing.