On 2009-03-13, Peter Cros <address@hidden> wrote:
A brief read of the mininmyth docs suggests it can also run on
a fat partition on the gpt hard disk.
No, the minimyth kernel doesn't support EFT/GPT partitioned
disks. It also doesn't support SATA hard drives. Currently,
it doesn't even know the hard-drive is there. If it did, it
wouldn't know what to do with it.
You can put an hfs+ partition on a msdos disk, or a fat32
partition on a gpt disk and grub.efi can handle both. plus
linux ext2/3.
Right, but the MiniMyth kenel can only handle msdos parition
tables, and Macs will only boot from GPT partioned disks.
Have you installed the rEFIt boot manager
http://refit.sourceforge.net/ It simplifies testing and the
web site has good information on Apple efi booting and some
history.
Thanks.
You need to read the Mac OSX bless manual closely to compare
the options, and experiment.
I've read that man page dozens of times. It's pretty vague. One
thing that's confusing it talks a lot about "the volume" --
always in the singular. I can't figure out to what "volume"
refers such that there is never more than one in a system.
Seems to me the key issue is getting your kernel and system
running, identity any grub development issues, the other stuff
can be optimised later.
At this point, there aren't any grub development issues. Grub
works fine. The current issues are caused by:
1) Mac firmware not being able to boot from anything other
than an HFS+ partion on a GPT partioned drive.
2) MiniMyth kernel lacks support for EFI/GPT parition tables
and SATA hard drives.
I'm going to try rebuilding MiniMyth with GPT support so that I
can GPT partition a USB flash drive in hopes of getting the Mac
to boot from it. I'm also going to try adding AHCI SATA
controller support to MiniMyth so that I can spin down the
hard-drive.
My experience has been with other users of Apple Intel Macs
bootng Debian/Ubuntu linux and Mac OSX, using grub-pc and
grub-efi. It helps to have a linux installation on the hard
drive.
That's sort of heading the wrong direction. My goal is not to
have to touch the Mac hard-drive at all. So far, that's not
been possible, but I'm getting closer.