[Fedora-livecd-list] Mac (EFI) USB booting

[Daire Byrne]

Jeremy,

----- "Jeremy Katz" <katzj at redhat.com> wrote:

> PowerMacs (PPC) are an entirely different beast and there's not
> really been any work done on getting them booting off of USB.

Indeed - not too bothered about them.
 
> For the x86 based Macs, it can work, but it's definitely far from
> just working everywhere right now.  The first question is if your machine
> is 32bit or 64bit EFI as we require matching x86 vs x86_64,
> respectively, based on that.  Most of the original Core Duo stuff is 32bit EFI, the
> newer is 64bit.  If you're using a 64bit EFI machine, right now,
> you're out of luck -- the kernel even in Fedora 10 was broken with 64bit EFI
> :(

Yes I saw that. Like I said I'd just be happy to even get one of my Macs to recognise the USB drive as a boot device at this point! I suppose I should test on a new MacBook too for completeness. I would have thought the Mac Mini should work though as that is x86_64 and has the Core Duo 2.

> I never managed to get rEFIt to boot off of an MBR-based USB device.
> Some people said they did, but I have no clue what they did to do so
> :)

I found the same kind of confusion too - some say it can be done others say it can't. To be honest booting a MBR USB stick on Mac is still probably the best way to go because the 3D gfx for ATI/Nvidia doesn't work under EFI atm. I think I'm going to have to try booting of a CD just for the GRUB/SysLinux boot and then mount the USB stick after the kernel boots up and the initrd scripts begin.

Thanks for the reply.

Daire