I have a dual boot system that boots both MacOSX and TW. Up until today I’d been running Yosemite and TW and was using Enoch(Chameleon) to dual boot and had no problems. So I decided to update to Sierra and got it up and running. I ended up using Clover as Enoch had problems with Sierra and nvdia web drivers.
Now for the problem - Both Yosemite and TW were being used without UEFI. I now have Sierra using EFI fine with Clover but TW will not boot with Clover. I tried both Legacy and PBR modes and installed the Grub and VBox drivers and still no go. Clover sees the TW install as “GNU-Grub” instead of Linux and just instantly hangs when trying to boot.
Am I going to have to reinstall TW and set it up with EFI to make it work or is their some way to get it boot as-is?
Thanks!
Dave
I ended up using Chameleon/Eunoch instead of Clover. It seems Clover will not boot Linux unless it has an EFI boot partition. And I can’t find any way to add that to TW without completely re-installing it from scratch. And I can’t use the built in loader on TW because it doesn’t see the MacOSX partition but it does see and boot the old XP partition that I don’t use anymore.
Chameleon is not as fancy as Clover but at least it works. Maybe in the future if I have to rebuilt TW from scratch I will redo it with EFI.
If anyone knows a way to make Clover boot a non-EFI Linux install please let me know!
Thanks!
Hi
Not sure about the tools you have used, I have an older MacBook 3,1, I boot Tumbleweed direct with UEFI, if want to boot into MacOS just press the option key. It’s probably the filesystem change… but in saying that if your MacOS will boot UEFI, then it may just be a matter of checking the nvram entries in Tumbleweed with efibootmgr command and manually adding if os-prober/YaST bootloader doesn’t work.
I’m guessing your TW has an EFI boot partition. When I installed TW I used the defaults and it didn’t create a EFI partition, just Grub. Everything I have read has said I have to completely reinstall TW to add a EFI boot partition. Partly because it used BTRFS due to it being installed on a SSD. I tried using the prober in the MacOS’s Clover efi bootloader and it finds Grub but won’t boot from it. I’ve spent the better part of today researching this and everything points to me having to reinstall TW and setting it up with an EFI boot partition. I’ve found several other forum threads with people having similar problems and all ended up reinstalling Linux. It would be great if there was a way around this as I have 3 computers I wanted to upgrade and it would be nice to not have to reinstall Linux on all them them.
So I am now using a bootloader called Enoch which is derived from Chameleon and it is non-efi legacy and it boots both MacOSX and TW just fine but I’d rather have EFI booting at least from the MacOSX which does work but it won’t boot TW even if I force it to Legacy mode.
Update:
I examined the TW Bootloader with Yast and by default it only set up as booting from root and not MBR which is why the MacOSX Clover cannot access it as it can only access EXT2 and 4 and not BTRFS. So thats why it won’t work.
My question now is can I add the MBR boot without breaking the install?
A default EFI install will use existing EFI boot partition and mount it as /boot/efi and use grub2-efi. But default depends on how you boot the installer if booted in legacy mode then no entry to EFI boot is made and it is not mounted and MBR booting is used and grub2 is used. As a general rule you can not cross boot EFI and MBR installs unless you use the UEFI boot menu.
On Mon 25 Sep 2017 01:06:01 AM CDT, AmigaOS wrote:
I’m guessing your TW has an EFI boot partition. When I installed TW I
used the defaults and it didn’t create a EFI partition, just Grub.
Everything I have read has said I have to completely reinstall TW to add
a EFI boot partition. Partly because it used BTRFS due to it being
installed on a SSD. I tried using the prober in the MacOS’s Clover efi
bootloader and it finds Grub but won’t boot from it. I’ve spent the
better part of today researching this and everything points to me having
to reinstall TW and setting it up with an EFI boot partition. I’ve found
several other forum threads with people having similar problems and all
ended up reinstalling Linux. It would be great if there was a way around
this as I have 3 computers I wanted to upgrade and it would be nice to
not have to reinstall Linux on all them them.
So I am now using a bootloader called Enoch which is derived from
Chameleon and it is non-efi legacy and it boots both MacOSX and TW just
fine but I’d rather have EFI booting at least from the MacOSX which does
work but it won’t boot TW even if I force it to Legacy mode.
Update:
I examined the TW Bootloader with Yast and by default it only set up as
booting from root and not MBR which is why the MacOSX Clover cannot
access it as it can only access EXT2 and 4 and not BTRFS. So thats why
it won’t work.
My question now is can I add the MBR boot without breaking the install?
Hi
Either way it’s a reinstall since you will need a /boot partition in
there… 
I did a time machine backup of MacOS (was HDD) and then
installed a SSD and pre configured so I could use the time machine
backup, then installed openSUSE.
If things are working, then I would leave as is, then when the time is
right, look at cleaning up.
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
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TW is on its own SSD and has no EFI or boot partition. Yast shows its only able to boot from root which is BRTFS. (No MBR or EFI). The Clover Bootloader says it can only read Grub from EXT2 or EXT4 File systems so that is why it won’t work. This was the default install when I installed TW originally. I didn’t change it at all and took its defaults. I didn’t care at the time as then I was also using Yosemite on another SSD also with no EFI and Enoch bootloader handled them both just fine using Legacy.
But I just installed Sierra using EFI and the newer Clover bootloader and it can’t access TW as it is. I was able to get Enoch to boot both of them using Legacy so that is ok for now. I have 2 other systems the same way and I just wanted to find a way to not have to reinstall TW on all of them. I have the Time Machine on all 3 machines going to a NAS.
That’s wrong. Adding ESP is trivial as long as you can actually create ESP (i.e. you have free space on disk).
Partly because it used BTRFS
How is type of filesystem in one partition related to creating different partition?
I examined the TW Bootloader with Yast and by default it only set up as booting from root and not MBR which is why the MacOSX Clover cannot access
It is trivial again to change bootloader location at any time, not only during installation.
it as it can only access EXT2 and 4 and not BTRFS. So thats why it won’t work.
Legacy bootloader will chainload code from MBR or PBR. Why it needs to know filesystem type?
My question now is can I add the MBR boot without breaking the install?
You mean to openSUSE? Edit /etc/default/grub_installdevice, replace device name for partition with device name for the whole disk (likely simply removing “_partN” from /dev/disk/by-…) and run “update-bootloader --reinit”. If you want to boot from MBR of different disk, replace device name accordingly. You may also want to delete “generic_mbr” line which is likely present and probably “activate” which becomes redundant here (although I think they are interpreted by YaST only).
It should have been possible with YaST but there was a bug where changing bootloader location did not actually install bootloader in this location. Workaround was to change bootloader type in YaST (e.g. to “none”), save and then select grub2 again with new location. Not sure whether the bug is still present.
Clover only has drivers for HFS, NTFS, EXT2, EXT4 etc and not BTRFS. And on my TW the bootloader is in root.
How can I make space to add a boot partition when BTRFS is not re sizable?
If there is a way to make space then I’d rather add an EFI boot partition so I can use Clover easily.
You have very unusual sources of information. Of course it is resizable. Random google hit: https://askubuntu.com/questions/75120/how-can-i-safely-resize-shrink-a-btrfs-partition
I’ve already spent hours trying to resize the BTRFS partition in the past when I wanted to enlarge it. I first tried GParted and even with the btrfs-tools it would not allow any resizing. And I was running the latest version from a bootable CD and not on a running TW.
The terminal method using btrfs shows promise but it doesn’t seem to have a way to specify whether the shrinking can be done at the front end or only from the tail end of the partition.
You do have to to have space to expand and you can’t have a full partition to reduce
Show fdisk -l from any Lunix/Unix system
How big did you set root?
You need only about 300-500 meg for an external boot