Arch Linux

riemannia

Member

From: Salt Lake City, UT

Registered: 2012-05-20

Posts: 4

Macbook & creating EFI bootable media

Hi,

I've got a quick clarification on something written on ArchWiki MacBook installation instructions concerning creating UEFI bootable media; it states "You will need to format the EFI partition with the hfsplus filesystem (hfsprogs) instead of vfat;" does this refer to the partition on the USB stick, or the EFI partition created on the macbook?  If it is the former, I do not understand why it is referring to the USB partition as the "EFI partition;" if it is the latter, this seems to be in direct contradiction to the simple example of partitions created on the macbook thereafter.

I'm having a bit of trouble creating a bootable stick based on these instructions.  I assume rEFIt is not required, since it is not mentioned on the macbook page.  When I press alt on start up, my USB drive does not appear.   (Though I wouldn't imagine this has any relevance on the USB drive appearing, currently this macbook only has Debian installed on it.  I'm picking up some replacement install disks on Friday in order to create a clean install of Mac OS X to start from as suggested on the wiki's macbook page, but I wanted to see if my USB drive would actually boot first.)

Thank you very much for any help, apologies if I have overlooked any of the available literature which might clarify my issue.

spikkle

Member

Registered: 2013-09-19

Posts: 13

Re: Macbook & creating EFI bootable media

Hi riemannia,

The instructions are actually referring to a second partition, which you make as part of the install, that is a EFI bootable partition.  For example, on my rMBP-15, I have a 100MB /dev/sda4 which is hfs+ formatted and contains a grub.efi in System/Library/CoreServices on that partition.  This is so that when you hold down option at boot, you'll have a choice between "Macintosh HD" and "Whatever you named your Linux EFI boot partition".

See once-through guide on vec.io (https://vec.io/posts/use-arch-linux-and … na-display) for a step by step.  However, be aware that as things are right now, your newer Linux 3.11.6 kernel and the Nvidia 325 driver will result in a black screen and a computer that doesn't appear to respond.  You can use the fbdev driver for X if you need to between now and (hopefully) Nvidia 331.

Hope that helps.