Nebhrajani
From: India
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.
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 (@)
From: Germany
I click EFI Boot, Mac OS boots up and want to initialize the unknown USB stick.
Any help?
Admin reply: Hi Markus, I am sorry that my tips on that are really more kind of guesses. Here is the text that I replied to Chris that day. He has had a gmail account and there non-gmail mails are often sorted out as spam, so maybe thats because I never got an reply: "My first guess is, that the firmware of the Mac is not able to recognize such a new stick (It must be able to talk to the firmware of the stick). So, if this is the case, try use an older stick. If this does not help, ensure to have the newest firmware on the Mac. Most often, this is ensured by using the newest OS X that is possible. But even here sometimes it is sometimes necessary to Download and install it manually (Don't ask me how :-)
I've heard, that some Linux distros changed their path to the grub menu."
See the rest of my page for how to look that up.