I have a MacbookPro8,1 with a 500GB HDD, running OS X 10.8.5 Mountain Lion.
I used the Disk Utility app on Mac OS to create a new 50GB free space partition to install Ubuntu on.
I installed rEFIt and live booted from a CD with Ubuntu 13.04 on it. While live booting I used gparted to create a SWAP area of 1GB and formatted the remaining free space as EXT4. These two were /dev/sda4 and /dev/sda5 respectively. The EXT4 was flagged as the boot loader (grub) partition.
Then, I installed Ubuntu on the EXT4 through the desktop icon while live-booting from CD with no problems. After the installing was finished, I rebooted the laptop, the CD popped out, and I got to the rEFIt boot loader screen. I selected the "partition tool" from the menu and rEFIt said it successfully synced my partitioning tables.
I shut down the computer, turned it back on, got to the rEFIt screen again and now I had two options: Boot Mac OS and Boot Ubuntu from HD. Whenever I try to boot into Ubuntu, I get a white screen with the Linux penguin greyed out in the middle, and after a few seconds a black screen with the text "Missing operating system..."
I suspect there is a problem with the partition tables, but I don't know how to fix it. If anyone can help I can include the report from the Partition Inspector tool that came with rEFIt.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
1 Answer
First, rEFIt has been abandoned. I've forked the project as rEFInd and added significant new capabilities, particularly for handling Linux installations. You might therefore want to try using rEFInd. You should be able to use a CD-R or USB flash drive image (although these sometimes don't work on some Macs) for testing.
Second, the procedure you followed creates a hybrid MBR, which is an ugly and dangerous hack that's not required to boot Linux on most Macs. You're usually better off installing Linux in EFI mode and using a conventional GPT disk. This will require using an EFI-mode boot loader for Linux (rEFInd in conjunction with a 3.3.0 or later kernel works well for this) rather than the BIOS-mode GRUB.
Third, if you installed GRUB to the Linux partition, that means that there's no BIOS-mode boot loader in the disk's MBR. If you must do a BIOS-mode boot, you probably need a BIOS-mode boot loader in the MBR, so you'll need to install one. The Boot Repair tool should be able to put GRUB there, or you can do it manually from a live CD.
