Comments on: Fedora, Macs and EFI

By: Fedora 15 auf MacBook 5,1 allein installieren « softmetzbetrieb

Fedora 15 auf MacBook 5,1 allein installieren « softmetzbetrieb — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 21:54:18 +0000

[...] fand ich die Lösung in zwei Bordmitteln, namentlich parted und gptsync. Was war passiert? Das Installationsprogramm von [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:11:48 +0000

Great, glad it helped

-c

By: sunnz

sunnz — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:46:32 +0000

Ohhh thank you thank you and thank you!! Was trying to install Fedora 13 on my MacBook Pro and it kept going “no bootable device”, unflagging the boot bit sda3 works and now I am typing this in full installation of Fedora 13!! <3

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 03:07:15 +0000

I got it, thanks for your help. Windows 7. It turns out it was just my crappy old version of XP that I had pulled out of the closet was the problem! The partitions were configured correctly the whole time, it was the XP install disk that was causing all the fuss. Once I tried a newer Vista & 7 disk, I had no problems.

Formatting to NTFS made no difference. I will also note (for anyone stuck on this issue) that “toggle 4 boot” caused some problem when I tried to un-toggle it. It unset the boot, but removed the drive name and flagged is “msftrsv” and I was unable to toggle off that flag. After that the drive was not readable in the OSX diskutil (which scared me). The solution was to change the properties of the drive (I set it to MS-DOS) then delete it completely and start over with partition creation & resizing.

Also, my original problem of not getting the drive changes to stick was solved by uninstalling rEFIt each time I started over.

Thanks a million for your assist. My breakthrough was when you pointed out that XP calling the partition 150 made no sense… that got me to try another Windows installer.

Now I am on to my next challenge of trying to get the Macbook broadcom wireless working in F12

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 04:01:56 +0000

Something like:

yum install ntfsprogs
mkfs.ntfs /dev/sda4

Then make sure that you do a partition sync using rEFIt.

Then boot the Windows installer and see what happens..

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:54:48 +0000

Great suggestions, do you have a rec for formatting NTFS on F12?

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:50:49 +0000

Well, Windows *should* only see one partition, but it should see the last one, which on your machine looks like it should be about 75GB.

I don’t know why it’s seeing 150GB, that makes no sense.

Anyway, I’m thinking you could try booting to Fedora and use parted to toggle boot on the Windows partition.

Same as instructed in the post, but partition 4, I think.

You could also try formatting it NTFS under Linux, in case EFI is getting confused over two FAT32 partitions.

Other than that, I’m running out of ideas..

-c

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:45:49 +0000

I was afraid you would ask that. First, I added anaconda to Fedora and rand gptsync there, shutdown, and tried Windows again. No luck.

I reboot, ran the refit tool, it said “in sync, no need to run”

When I rebooted from there into the Windows disk, still just the same partition so sad! I have been logging back in to fedora to check the partitions and they look the same: all good, no change. I wonder if I should try a different version of Windows?

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:19:11 +0000

Hmm… so what happens if you run the partition tool from the rEFIt menu?

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:15:50 +0000

Well, MAC & Linux work, but my problem is still the one you discuss on this page…. when I go to install XP, Windows Setup finds only one C partition:

C: Partition 1 [Unkonwn] 131072 MB (131071 MB Free)

I can’t see to get around that even following your awesome suggestions. Any ideas? Thanks a million for the help! Hopefully, this will help others too.