I’ve been trying to install opensuse to dual boot with osx but I keep on failing at a crucial step:
I installed rEFIt, created a live USB stick with opensuse and split my main hard drive to have space for installing linux.
The problem comes when locating the bootloader (I think) because on restart my computer automatically runs GRUB and from there the only OS that I can use is opensuse, for some reason it can’t load OSX. I can solve this by pressing the “c” key on reboot and forcing my computer to start from rEFit, from which I can boot OSX and opensuse normally.
What do I have to do so that rEFIt is automatically the first choice on boot and not GRUB2? I tried changing the bootloader to just GRUB and LILO but apparently it’s not supported (because I get a warning). I think I’m pretty close to making it work but I’m not sure on how to acutally make sure I’m intstalling the bootloader where it’s acutally supposed to be.
On http://refit.sourceforge.net/, have you seen the message:
‘2013-03-29: As you may have noticed, rEFIt is no longer actively maintained.’ ?
which opensuse? installer DVD, live system, 32bit, 64bit ?
This has been a prerequisite for installing any Linux on a given system ever since,
as long as you don’t plug an additional hard disk in order to install Linux on that one.
This is nothing special.
GRUB ??
Which one ???
You have to be more specific!
Above you wrote about GRUB !
Now you write about GRUB2 !
Again, which GRUB ?
When using a version of LILO, in order to UEFI boot, you would in fact need ELILO instead of LILO !! …
which would be reasonable if you should have tried to boot an EFI system by installing a non-EFI bootloader.
Now, what kind of bootloaders did you exactly try to install?
And what kind of installation media (or image of it) did you use for opensuse ?
Don’t know Mac but you need grub2-efi to properly setup EFI in the Windows world
Be careful of following old instructions Things in the grub world have undergone a large change in the last 2 years. So older instructions may not be appropriate for the new OS’s
Use rEFInd; it’s actively being maintained and works well. I haven’t used it for a macbook pro, but I am using it for the Mac Pro dual booting OSX and OpenSuse that I’m writing this on.
Install it from OSX by opening a terminal and sudo ./install.sh after mounting the disk image. (If the instructions say to do something else, follow them; it’s been several months since I installed rEFInd.) The installer “blesses” the rEFInd boot program so that is what you see when you start the machine. I don’t recall exactly how I arranged for Linux to be the default in rEFInd but I do recall that it was trivially simple, and maybe even documented (!).
You shouldn’t need to do anything EFI-ish on the linux / grub2 side of things. rEFInd will hand off to grub2 which will do its thing. I didn’t need grub2-efi.
By the way, if you install an OS/X update, it will reset the default bootloader back to OS/X, but it will NOT overwrite any of your rEFInd data on disk. All you have to do is re-run the install.sh, which re-blesses the existing rEFInd info, and you’ll have your rEFInd setup back.
