Arch Linux

saw2th

Member

Registered: 2013-05-30

Posts: 8

Unable to boot into fresh install on MacBook

I'm trying to run only Arch on my MacBook, and I'm having trouble booting into it. Ideally, I'd like to use rEFInd with EFISTUB, but at this point I'll do anything to boot (today marks day 5). I followed the wiki's guide to build my system, and tried using rEFInd/EFISTUB. I know I need to "bless" the EFI partition (I have a 512MiB HFS+ partition for EFI mounted at /boot/efi), but I no longer have the OS X partition, and when I used the OS X install disk to bless the partition, it wouldn't mount it. Instead, I tried using mactel-boot I ran

mactel-boot-setup /boot/efi /EFI/refind/refind_ia32.efi /EFI/refind/refind.conf

It ran with no errors, but when I reboot, I get a black screen with the error

No bootable device found -- Please insert bootable disk and press any key

There's a blinking cursor, but nothing happens when I press a key.

Has anyone found a reliable way of only running Arch on an early (32-bit) MacBook? I had it running for two years on BIOS compatibility/GRUB Legacy, but I accidentally reformatted my hard drive and lost everything last week. I don't mind running in BIOS compatibility, but I'd prefer to run a modern bootloader at the very least, and if I could use rEFInd that would be fabulous. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Durden

Member

Registered: 2011-06-19

Posts: 261

Re: Unable to boot into fresh install on MacBook

I've been meaning to install Arch on my macbook air for some time but every time I look at that wiki I shudder with how little sense it makes.

My understanding about the "bless" command is that it just speeds up the boot time by telling the system which disk to boot from first, otherwise it will sit at the grey screen for a while looking for boot partitions. Blessing it wont help unless it's setup right to begin with.

I'd really like to know how Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu make this so easy. You don't have to do anything extra to get Ubuntu to install and boot on a Mac, wish I knew what the difference was. I'd update the wiki myself with that info. I just don't have the time to research it much right now.