Arch Linux

rohanprabhu

Member

Registered: 2011-08-23

Posts: 16

Triple booting on a Mac Book [almost there]; boot loader issues

Here is my current GPT/MBR partition table:

Current GPT partition table:
 #      Start LBA      End LBA  Type
 1             40       409639  EFI System (FAT)
 2         409640    663646255  Mac OS X HFS+
 3      663646256    664915791  Mac OS X Boot
 4      664915968   1164914687  Basic Data
 5     1164914688   1169649663  Linux Swap
 6     1169649664   1465149134  Unknown

Current MBR partition table:
 # A    Start LBA      End LBA  Type
 1              1       409639  ee  EFI Protective
 2         409640    663646255  af  Mac OS X HFS+
 3      663646256    664915791  ab  Mac OS X Boot
 4 *    664915968   1164914687  07  NTFS/HPFS

The above is information I got from the 'Partition Inspector' on Mac OS X. Here is the situation:

Partition2: I have Mac OS X 10.7 installed
Partition4: I have Windows 8 Release Preview installed
Partition6: I have Arch installed (without boot loader)

I have rEFIt installed.

This is what I am able to do:

1. Boot into Mac and Windows using rEFIt.
2. Boot into the Arch setup on my USB drive and chroot into the installed system.

This is what I am not able to do:

1. Boot into the installed Arch system and/or install a boot loader.

So what I basically need is to install a boot loader. I followed the instructions given in the Arch manual, but installing both grub-bios and grub-efi-x86_64 is not working.

1. Installing grub-bios gives an error 'Cannot identify filesystem on /dev/sda' and grub-efi-x86_64 gives an error saying 'Fatal: Couldn't open either sysfs or procfs directories for accessing EFI variables. Try 'modprobe efivars' as root'. I tried `mod probe efivars`, but it didn't help the situation. I get the above error when I run the command:

# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=arch_grub --recheck

My basic question is what options do I have to setup my triple boot.. since I am almost there.

EDIT
Is it possible for me to simply boot from rEFIt? Like how I would do it from grub by specifying the root, kernel and initrd parameters?

Last edited by rohanprabhu (2012-08-30 07:02:06)

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,279

Re: Triple booting on a Mac Book [almost there]; boot loader issues

Yes, you can use rEFIt and the kernel EFI stub to boot. I don't know how well the graphics drivers will work, though.
If you have problems, try to use lilo or syslinux, you won't need the oversized grub2
http://refit.sourceforge.net/doc/c2s2_startos.html

Last edited by progandy (2012-08-30 07:21:57)

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rohanprabhu

Member

Registered: 2011-08-23

Posts: 16

Re: Triple booting on a Mac Book [almost there]; boot loader issues

But there is no entry for linux showing up on rEFIt. How do I still boot into arch? It asks me to make a efi folder and copy the elilo.efi file there along with other files. Create the `efi` folder where? Copy the elilo.efi file from where?

jukkan

Member

Registered: 2010-09-08

Posts: 39

Re: Triple booting on a Mac Book [almost there]; boot loader issues

I recently spent a good amount of time making a similar triple boot to work and hassled with the gpt/mbr stuff so I might be of help. I am not using rEFIt, though.

Possible reason to why any Linux entry don't show up is that the partition is of unknown type in your GPT table. You could try to change the type for it manually.

Mine says:

Current GPT partition table:
 #      Start LBA      End LBA  Type
 1             40       409639  EFI System (FAT)
 2         409640     98444463  Mac OS X HFS+
 3       98707456    177307647  Basic Data
 4      177307648    488394751  Basic Data

Current MBR partition table:
 # A    Start LBA      End LBA  Type
 1              1       409639  ee  EFI Protective
 2         409640     98444463  af  Mac OS X HFS+
 3 *     98707456    177307647  07  NTFS/HPFS
 4      177307648    488394751  83  Linux

Last edited by jukkan (2012-08-30 22:47:50)

ewaves

Member

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 39

Re: Triple booting on a Mac Book [almost there]; boot loader issues

I think that arch doesn't show up for the efivars error you are getting. I have the same problem with arch only boot, it simply doesn't start.