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

[Daire Byrne]

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

> > > 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.
> >
> If you can find a way to consistently get an MBR USB stick to boot, I'd
> love to help improve the docs there as I agree, it would certainly be
> the "best" thing.  
> 
> One thing you can do is make a boot cd that has just the isolinux
> bits and then points to a USB stick for the rootfs just by changing the
> root= and rootfstype= arguments in isolinux.cfg.  I have done that with no
> problems a number of times

Just to follow up I have resorted to using a CD to do the MBR Grub boot with the kernel and initrd booting from the CD but the root squashfs filesystem mounted from the USB stick. This seems to be the most compatible way of using a USB stick on a wide variety of Macs. The EFI stuff even when it works will not do 3d acceleration.

Now I just need to get a version of the intel (i810) X11 drivers to work on my Mac Mini.....

Thanks for the feedback.

Daire