MacBook rEFIt Bootloader Questions [SOLVED]

Kvetch · Last edited by Kvetch on Fri Dec 29, 2006 5:53 am; edited 1 time in total

I am trying to get Gentoo install on my MacBook but am running into an issue on loading the OS in rEFIt. The Gentoo Macbook Wiki page http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Apple_MacBook states it is best to use LILO but the latest grub works fine too. Since I haven't used LILO in years I first tried grub. Grub failed to install for me stating that /boot needed to be rw. I did not create a separate /boot so I am not sure why it would squawk but I was feeling lazy and didn't care to find out so I installed LILO. LILO installed fine but when I rebooted and re-synced, rEFIt had a GPT section that showed the Linux part as a Legacy OS but had some section stating mbr was Linux for my Linux part. I re-synced but can't boot into Gentoo.
The rEFIt page http://refit.sourceforge.net/doc/c2s2_startos.html states to use ELILO and you need to copy some files over. Is this correct, if so how do you mount that EFI partition to copy the files over? Was I really suppose to use ELILO instead of LILO?

I then wiped my Linux partitions and created a 100M ext2 /boot and the rest ext3 /. Just to see what rEFIt would see I rebooted and the MBR section sees the correct thing but it keeps wanting to resync and use the GPT table which for some reason always states it is FAT32. Why would rEFIt see it as FAT32.
Some sites I have come across which seem older than the Gentoo Wiki state you don't want to create your first partition in BootCamp and you want to bless rEFIt in OSX. I think these articles are older than the automatic rEFIt dmg installation since that blesses for you. How are other people getting rEFIt to see their Linux part?

Thanks,
Nick

nss · Guru Joined: 04 Oct 2004 Posts: 389

I have Debian etch amd64 running on my macbook core 2. To get rEFIt to see the Debian partitions properly I did the following:
1.) Installed MacOS X on the entire drive.
2.) Used bootcamp to shrink MacOSX partition, the remaining space to be used by Linux.
3.) Booted from the Debian installation cd.
4.) Created Linux partitions, in my case / and /home.
5.) rebooted.
6.) synced with rEFIt.
7.) rebooted into Debian installation cd.
8.) Finished install. (lilo on sda3, non-active partition)

I tried a similar "partition reboot sync install" process with gentoo but did not have a successful result. My last attempt to install gentoo on the macbook, I used the debian partitioner, rebooted, synced, rebooted into gentoo installation, installed, rebooted and got a kernel panic:

Kvetch · Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 5:53 am Post subject:

I think I figured out why. The Gentoo Wiki doesn't seem to mention that you shouldn't use fdisk to create your partitions since fdisk doesn't support GPT. I redid my installation but I used parted to create two partition then used mke2fs to format them. I then reboot into rEFIt and resynced. GPT sees them as FAT32 until the resync where it see the MBR correctly but the GPT as Basic Data. Then I rebooted and installed Gentoo.

DocterD · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 May 2004 Posts: 129

I got the same Problem

First it happened randomly on boot, but now i`m stuck. Is there now a clear fix against it or not? I already tried to rebuild my System but nothing changed.

Kvetch · Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 3:15 am Post subject:

After you installed Gentoo and rebooted, did you go into REFIT and re-sync? If so just boot off the Live-CD again and use fdisk to set the part types back to Linux. Then just reboot.