The amd64+mac iso and Trouble booting ubuntu/backtrack/actually any distro

[peter rus]

Ubuntuists,

I have been trying to boot ubuntu on my macbook early 2011 for a while now. I remember it used to work as I booted ubuntu 10.11 once.

The problem is that when I boot the 11.10 CD I get dropped to a (initramfs) prompt as the environment doesn't seem to be able to find the live filesystem.

When fiddling around a bit in this environment I find out that I have no /dev/sdb device node. Seems that is the reason why the live filesystem cant be found, as that is where the DVD drive should be.

I then found out about the amd64+mac iso (http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/11.10/release/) and burned that to a DVD. The issue still persists however. Is this a known issue? Any fixes?

Furthermore, not entirely related however:

I am trying this because I can't seem to boot a backtrack iso (which has the same problem). As a workaround I tried to use a usb drive loaded with backtrack using unetbootin. As the EFI bootloader does not allow booting from usb appearently I had to install rEFIt on my macbook's EFI partition. it seems rEFIT is quite outdated however.

I tried booting a ubuntu 11.10 usb stick and a backtrack 5r1 usb stick and both give me a 'Operating System Not Found' error. The sticks are however working fine on a regular (BIOS) PC. When I have a ubuntu cd inserted and I choose rEFIt's 'Boot Linux from USB' the CD gets booted instead.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance, and I don't seem to be the only one having this problem.

[peter rus]

By the way both ubuntu and backtrack USB-sticks boot using syslinux.

The Isolinux CD's do boot, however I have the (initramfs) problem.

I might try to boot a usb-stick distro that uses GRUB(2?) by default, I have yet to find one though.

[peter rus]

I have zero'd out my disk and created a new GUID partition table with one big hfs+ partition for OS X. My partition table looks as such (according to 'diskutil list').

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS OS X                    999.3 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

I now get a 'invalid system disk replace the disk and then press any key' error. As far as I know this error is generated by the BIOS emulation module of the EFI firmware, this would mean that it couldn't find a valid MBR on the USB-stick.

The previous 'Operating System Not Found' errormessage is part of the FAT32 header so this might mean the macbook could find the USB-disk but not boot from it. Not sure though.

[peter rus]

I have reverted to a single partition layout (which includes the hidden EFI and recovery partitions of course, as default on all macbooks. This does not make any difference, also a bootcamp setup (without installing windows after creating the bootcamp partition) does not make a difference.

rEFIt partition table syncing fails as well, I get a *Error not found returned from gptsync.efi*

as seen in the attached screenshot: No GPT partition table is found, and no MBR either. I am running rEFIt 0.14 of a small HFS+ partition at the end of the usb-drive.

Furthermore, I doubt rEFIts inability to boot a usb-stick has anything to do with the partition tables on my harddisk

[Khayyam]

[...] I might try to boot a usb-stick distro that uses GRUB(2?) by default, I have yet to find one though.

Perhaps my instructions here on making a bootable 11.10 USB stick will help ITR.

HTH

[peter rus]

Perhaps my instructions here on making a bootable 11.10 USB stick will help ITR.

HTH

Looks good! Thanks,

I suppose because you 'chainload' through that .efi file you don't have grub installed in the MBR of your memorystick. This would not boot in a regular PC right? If I wanted to make a bootstick that worked on both Macbooks and BIOS PC's this wouldn't be the solution. Unless you cold use syslinux/grub in the MBR to chainload the iso or something.

[Khayyam]

Peter ...

correct, there is no grub install to the sticks MBR, and yes, I imagine it won't boot non-efi (BIOS) machines, though I didn't attempt doing so.

It was something I'd created for a friend who'd had problems with the instructions posted in that thread, the stick is now in their hands. I didn't think at the time to try it on another machine.

As for creating a USB stick that boots both: given the instructions for on the Ubuntu download page this is supposed to be the case, but from what I've read Apple's efi implimentation is somewhat non-standard, and a USB stick created from those instructions isn't recognised as bootable on boot+ALT (even though the iso image provides /efi/boot/*.efi and is therefore capable of efi booting). So, in theory there is no reason why this shouldn't be possible, but I'm inclined to think that the implimentation employed by Apple won't allow it.

HTH