[Bug 693635] New: Intel Mac and Live USB

[mike cloaked]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 8:33 AM,  <bugzilla at redhat.com> wrote:
> Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
> comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.
>
> Summary: Intel Mac and Live USB
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=693635
>
>           Summary: Intel Mac and Live USB
>           Product: Fedora Documentation
>           Version: devel
>          Platform: x86_64
>        OS/Version: Mac OS
>            Status: NEW
>          Severity: medium
>          Priority: unspecified
>         Component: docs-requests
>        AssignedTo: nobody at fedoraproject.org
>        ReportedBy: earthwormgaz at googlemail.com
>         QAContact: fedora-docs-list at redhat.com
>                CC: stickster at gmail.com, kwade at redhat.com,
>                    nb at fedoraproject.org, eric at christensenplace.us,
>                    oglesbyzm at gmail.com
>    Classification: Fedora
>      Story Points: ---
>
>
> Description of problem:
>
> Hi,
>
> I just spent a couple of days trying to put the F15 Alpha Live CD image onto a
> USB stick for use with my Macbook Pro.
>
> It turns out this isn't possible.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_USB#Limitations
>
> I think this ought to go on the documentation somewhere, just to save people
> time.
>
> In my case, my CD drive is dead, so I can't install Fedora.

There is a way around this which works pretty well for some machines -
if you can get the PLOP bootloader to boot then you can select a usb
device that has a bootable install iso on it.

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmngrusblog.html

It has a number of different ways to start up apart from using a CD
drive - I use it on an old machine (without usb boot) that has grub
available and put the binary in the /boot area and make a grub stanza
to boot it - once it boots to plop you can select the plugged in
usbkey.

I am not familiar enough with the Macbook Pro to know if you can get
the binary to boot without using the CD drive but it may be worth
exploring? I have seen from postings elsewhere that PLOP does support
booting from EFI so maybe it is worth trying to explore?

-- 
mike c