Arch Linux

jon.reeve

Member

Registered: 2013-04-29

Posts: 22

Booting a UEFI USB disk on MacOS?

I'm installing Arch to an external USB drive. I can boot on the USB from my own laptop (a Lenovo) but it doesn't work when I plug the USB into a Mac (a Macbook Pro). Holding down Option on the Mac shows its internal HD, but it doesn't seem to recognize the USB drive. Here are the commands I'm using to partition the disk and make the UEFI partition bootable:

# Enter the label for your USB drive here. 
disk=/dev/sdb

function partition() { 
	echo "Partitioning $disk!"
	parted $disk mktable gpt
	parted $disk mkpart primary fat32 1MiB 513MiB
	parted $disk set 1 boot on
	parted $disk mkpart primary ext4 513MiB 100%
	# Disable journaling to lengthen life of USB disk by minimizing writes. 
	mkfs.ext4 -O "^has_journal" "$disk"2
	mkfs.fat -F32 "$disk"1
}
partition

Am I doing anything wrong? How would I change these commands so that a Mac can see the USB disk as bootable?

(The entire script I'm using to create the USB, by the way, is here.)

xvzf

Member

Registered: 2014-05-18

Posts: 86

Re: Booting a UEFI USB disk on MacOS?

Hi there!

Try using fat16 for the EFI partition and set the tag to ef00 (EFI boot partition), then it should work (Tested with MBP and MBAir)

Cheers

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