Can't dual-boot Fedora 14 on new MacBook Pro?

[Patrick Oltmann]

Hy there

Maybe it's a little too late for this but anyhow:

I encountered the same problem on a MacPro workstation using rEFIt and a 
triple-OS setup (OSX 10.6, Win 7 Enterprise, Fedora 14). Syncing the GPT data 
onto the MBR was necessary for both Fedora 14 and Win 7 to work, but it was 
obviously not sufficent to get Fedora to boot. 
In my case the solution to the problem was to remove the "boot" flag that was 
set for the Linux partion in the GPT using parted. After that (and an 
additional GPT->MBR sync) everything worked fine.

Hope that helps, 

Patrick

> Hello,
> 
> I'm trying to install Fedora (dual-boot) on a brand-new MacBook Pro.
> The live/installer CD runs flawlessly on the machine, which was a nice
> surprise. But after the install is completed, I cannot actually boot
> into Fedora. Here is what I did:
> 
> 1. OS X by default ships with an EFI partition (/dev/sda1) and an HFS+
> partition (/dev/sda2). I used Boot Camp in OS X to resize the existing
> OS X partition and reboot to the live CD.
> 
> 2. Once the Fedora live CD is booted, I used the disk utility to
> delete the "Windows" partition (/dev/sda3) that Boot Camp created.
> This leaves the original EFI and OS X partitions plus a chunk (40G) of
> empty space at the end of the disk.
> 
> 3. Run the Fedora Installer, telling it to automatically partition and
> install using the free space on the disk. It creates a 500M boot
> partition (/dev/sda3) and an LVM partition (/dev/sda4).
> 
> 4. When the installer gets to the part about the boot loader, I go
> with the defaults, which is to install GRUB to the boot sector of the
> Fedora boot partition (/dev/sda3).
> 
> After the install is complete, I would expect to be able to hold down
> the Mac's "Option" key to choose which OS to boot since /dev/sda3 has
> a boot sector, but only the OS X disk shows up. (What does Boot Camp
> do, then, besides resizing the disk?)
> 
> I read somewhere that a boot loader called rEFIt would help, so I
> tried that. I installed it using the instructions on the project's
> website and rebooted. An option to boot Linux shows up in the rEFIt
> boot screen, but when selecting it, I get a black screen with an error
> message along the lines of "no operating system found."
> 
> Further research suggested that rEFIt had to "resync" in order to find
> GRUB, even though I installed rEFIt after Fedora. I did that by going
> into the rEFIt "menu" and answering in the affirmative when it told me
> that a resync was necessary.
> 
> Now, when I select Linux in the rEFIt boot menu, it only shows a
> gray-out penguin and nothing else happens. The lack of output makes
> the problem difficult to troubleshoot exactly what's going wrong.
> Maybe if I knew more about EFI, I could play around in the EFI shell
> provided by rEFIt.
> 
> Anyway, has anyone here had success dual-booting Fedora 14 on a newer
> Mac, and if so, what procedure did you use? I'd like to install Fedora
> to the whole disk, but I'm reluctant to try that until I can get a
> dual-boot scenario to work. I you could, please CC my email address in
> any responses since I'm subscribed to the digest version of the list.
> 
> Thanks for your time.
> Charles