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Nebhrajani
From: India

I can confirm that this worked on a MacBook 2,1 with a broken DVD drive, and a Linux Mint ISO modded with the C program.

I used Stefan's page to create a bootable EFI USB, which was detected. I did not have rEFInd or rEFIt installed on the old OS X partition, the native bootloader found the stick. Booted into the installation medium, and wiped the hard drive. I had to do this multiple times, trying different partition table formats each time.

DOS didn't work for me and dropped into kernel panic after install. What eventually worked perfectly was a blank GPT partition table (use fdisk). Mint automatically formatted a partition to EFI, and ran through the install. Booted down, pulled out the USB, booted up again.

MacBook booted into the GRUB2 shell. Ran:

> set root =(hd0,gpt2) #this was where / was located.
> linux /vmlinux root=/dev/sda2
> initrd /initrd.img
> boot

It then boots correctly. Login, then
$ sudo update-grub

Admin reply: Hi Nebhrajani,

thank you for this comment. When I got into the grub command line while recently experimenting, vmlinuz and initrd are not on top-level, but in /boot/ folder. So I had to write
/boot/vmlinuz
and
/boot/initrd.img
to got it work.

UTC 2020|12|30 07:10:41 (@)

Steve Smith
From: Boston, Mass. USA

MacUSER, how did you set up the USB drive? Try per my previous comment. Details please, if it doesn't work.

Chris W, I am currently working in Boston but return to western Maine (which is home) on weekends.

UTC 2020|11|08 13:59:30 (@)

Steve Smith
From: Boston, Mass. USA

Chris, I forgot. I did not have any success with Matt's modified images--they work for some people, but not for my machine. Try it with a regular image, but add to EFI/BOOT bootia32.efi. When (if) grub comes up, edit the entry you want, adding nomodeset noefi. That got me booting to a Linux Mint desktop (from the USB). That wasn't the end of things, but the next step. I'll keep a closer eye on this blog in case I can help troubleshoot.

UTC 2020|11|08 13:54:20 (@)

Steve Smith
From: Boston, Mass. USA

Chris W: I don't know that this will work, but try removing the hard drive with MacOS on it, so the only boot option is the USB. Sorry I don't know more, but we can keep discussing.

UTC 2020|11|08 13:43:15 (@)

MacUSER
From: Germany

Hey, firstly, thank you for that description.
But I get an error when I try to boot from the USB Drive. After booting from the USB stick it only shows "Test memory". If I press "e" it only says: "setparams "Test Memory".
linux16 /install/mt86plus"

I have also tried to install Linux Mint. Here the USB stick can boot, but the installation on the hard disk is not possible.

Can you please help me? Stay health!

Admin reply: He finally figured out, that when taking the old HDD, instead of the new SSD the Mint install worked.

UTC 2020|11|06 19:20:52 (@)

Chris W
From: Maine, USA

I have a iMac 20" 5,1 Core2Duo late-2006 model. I have a 32GB SanDisk USB stick that I am using.

I have followed all the instructions so far, a couple times just to be sure (increasing the size to 4GB for the image, using Matt's 20.04 Ubuntu iso), but each time I see the "EFI Boot" option in the boot menu, click it, and then it goes to gray Apple logo and boots to MacOS.

Something is causing it not to catch GRUB? Any advice appreciated. :)

UTC 2020|10|07 14:24:11 (@)

Steve Smith
From: Boston, Mass. USA

Yesterday my new Linux system was pretty laggy. Someone on another forum advised removing 'nomodeset' as it inhibited acceleration. This helped. What's left is probably just the ancient cpu's, I have a pair of 5365's on the way.

UTC 2020|09|27 11:35:36 (@)

Steve Smith
From: Boston, Mass. USA

Change in behavior--now it boots by itself!
I had booted per the above a couple of times to make sure I knew how to do it, verified my changes had gotten into grub.cfg, it still required the above procedure.
Just now I ran the updater, accepting a bunch of changes including a new kernel. When I rebooted, the machine did it by itself, no intervention required.
I infer from this that it repaired grub, or something.
Anyway, I'm happy.
Huge thanks to Stefan for providing the details here.

UTC 2020|09|26 22:03:25 (@)

Steve Smith
From: Boston, Mass. USA

Booting the Mac with the Option/Alt key held down, I get two choices, "windows" and "efi". What the boot manager calls windows won't boot, but efi will. It boots to a grub prompt. I know how to boot from there:
grub> root=(hd0,2) <<set the directory to the second partition>>
grub> linux /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 nomodeset quiet nosplash noefi
grub> initrd /boot/initrd.img
grub> boot
Which takes me to a Linux Mint 20 desktop! Yay!

I modified the default grub.cfg (sda2), adding nomodeset and noefi in the appropriate place, then updated grub. It will not boot off the second partition as desired, I have to go through the above steps to boot.

see next comment

UTC 2020|09|26 22:02:59 (@)

Steve Smith
From: Boston, Mass. USA

Someone on the Mint forum suggested updating my firmware from 1,1 to 2,1. It took multiple attempts--not sure how many. This implies to me that I was making mistakes, but I don't know where. In the end, it worked. OSX formerly said I had 1,1 and now I have 2,1.

The firmware update made booting from an iso usb stick finally work, with these additions to the grub entry :
nomodeset quiet nosplash noefi
The iso usb stick was made according to Stefan's directions on this page.

Before installation, I had given my ssd a tiny first partition containing /efi/boot/bootia32.efi, so the Mac would boot (just as in the iso usb stick, but no grub.cfg).
I installed Mint 20 to my ssd, picked "something else" so I could select my own partitioning, keeping the first partition. I told it to put grub in sda2

continued next comment

UTC 2020|09|26 22:01:19 (@)