Arch Linux

dekela

Member

Registered: 2011-05-18

Posts: 16

installing Arch on a Macbook pro 5,2 is simply impossible ;-(

Thats it.. I give up..

I tried so many times...

I want a dual boot arch with OSX.

I followed the wiki to the letter and I always get to grub rescue shell which also dosent let me to recover using the wiki procidure.

Anyone here every installed arch on a macbook 5,2?

Not only I have to boot the live cd with the nouvea.noaccel=1 to even be able to boot (due to that pramin bug) Installing the bootloader is such a pain.

Which boot loader to choose? Grub2-Bios? Legacy? UFEI?

Please help.. I dont want arch on a virtual machine.. I want the full power of my mac..

My partion layout is:

/dev/sda
/dev/sda1 HFS+
/dev/sda2 ext2 /boot
/dev/sda3 ext4 /
/dev/sda4 ext4 /home

Thanks,

Dekel

ANOKNUSA

Member

Registered: 2010-10-22

Posts: 2,141

Re: installing Arch on a Macbook pro 5,2 is simply impossible ;-(

1) So this you don't really think is impossible, and you don't give up, or what?  I'm confused as to why you bothered posting...

2) If you're dual-booting on a Mac, you'll need to use UEFI.  Read up on that.  For the sake of convenience, you may want to use either rEFIt as your bootloader, or use the Archboot LiveCD to install grub2-efi automatically for you.  I'm no expert, but I'd say start by installing OS X, then shrink the partition, add the partitions you want and install Arch.  That way, the GUID partition table and EFI partition should already be taken care of.

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litemotiv

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2008-08-01

Posts: 5,026

Re: installing Arch on a Macbook pro 5,2 is simply impossible ;-(

I used to own a MBP 5,2 about 2 years ago. I installed rEFIt on OSX, then installed Arch from USB with grub-legacy on the /boot partition (syslinux works fine too). EFI boot didn't work for me back then since DRM only worked with Nvidia through legacy bios.

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masteryod

Member

Registered: 2010-05-19

Posts: 433

Re: installing Arch on a Macbook pro 5,2 is simply impossible ;-(

I don't know much about Macbooks but did you read Allan's blog about it? http://allanmcrae.com/2012/04/installin … k-pro-8-1/
There is link to Macbook 5.5 maybe it will help.

Last edited by masteryod (2012-05-08 22:58:38)

Fleet

Member

Registered: 2008-07-09

Posts: 33

Re: installing Arch on a Macbook pro 5,2 is simply impossible ;-(

Did you follow the MacBook Pro wiki page or the MacBook page (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Macbook)?. The method described on that page should also work for the MacBook Pro and I think it's meant to be general and not only for the discontinued MacBook series (that's how I thought when I updated it anyway).

Last edited by Fleet (2012-05-10 05:30:58)

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: installing Arch on a Macbook pro 5,2 is simply impossible ;-(

I am currently running Arch from my Macbook 2,1.  I opted for the grub2-bios because my machine has a old efi that is not entirely uefi... some crazy apple implementation of the original intel standard.  Such is the apple way I guess.  What i had to do though is, exit from the installer and enter an alternate tty.  I then chrooted into my Arch install and used pacman to get grub2.  I had heard that older macbooks have issues with grub legacy.  I am not sure about that, but I figured I would not take the chance.

I followed the instructions on the grub2 wiki page to install to a partition.  At first I failed numerous times before realizing that I had to populate /boot.  That way I could change the attributes as described on the wiki page and then use the grub-install... --recheck --force... etc.  Of course then proceeding onto creating grub-mkconfig command.

I am sure that with newer macbooks, uefi grub would be great, thus making it possible to remove refit altogether (uefi grub will show up in the native apple boot selection screen when you hold option/alt) but I am happy with the working bios alternative.

One thing that threw me for a loop, is that since you have a hybrid gpt/mbr, many partitioning systems and boot loader installations will totally kill your mbr, instead creating the protective mbr (a single patition labeled EE to prevent mbr only applications from thinkning you have a crap load of free space).  So I had to use fdisk to check to see what my mbr actually had on it.  If you see either only one partition coming up or its all crazy, you probably need to fix it before you can reboot successfully.  For this I used fdisk since it is not gpt aware and will not wreak havoc on your existing (and presumably correct) general partition table.  But in order to do that, you need to get the necessary information from something like gdisk (gpt fdisk).  If you are installing gdisk, you might as well use the built in tool to have it help you create a new hybrid mbr.

Run gdisk (# gdisk /dev/sdX) and enter "p" to print the gpt.  Then use "r" to enter recovery and transformation options (it says expert only, but you are an expert right?).  In the new menu use "h" to modify the hybrid mbr.  Follow the prompts, and remember that you are limited to 3 entries into the mbr (not the usual 4 beacuse the first one need to be a protective partition starting at block 1, gdisk will do this for you after you choose the partitions).  When satisfied with your modifications, use "w" to write the changes to disk and exit.  I would then reccomend, again, using "# fdisk -l" to check to make sure you are truly satisfied with the changes.  Reboot and cross your fingers.

I hope this helps someone, as it took me some time to realize just how crazy and screwed up a hybrid mbr can be.  I unsuccessfully tried gtpsync over and over again, but if your mbr is not screwed up in just the right way, it will simply exit and tell you that it cannot handle the situation.  I would recommend staying far far away from gptsync.  In fact, you should disable it from refit in the refit.conf, so that no one accidentally uses it.  Unfortunately though, disabling it will also disable refit's built in shell, which can also be pretty handy.  Good luck to all, and have faith that you will be in Arch land soon.  The fight is well worth it.  I like it so much, my OSX partition has become an unjournaled storage area for my music and movies!