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macbook pro, füll efi boot


From: Nerdy Friend
Subject: macbook pro, füll efi boot
Date: Sat, 5 May 2012 14:53:56 -0700

Hey,

I am writing the grub help list because I have been having difficulties properly installing and using grub on my machine. 

First the details of my setup and what I think I should be able to do:
I am using a MacBookPro8,1 which contains EFI 2.7 firmware (see macbook pro 13in early 2011 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1237?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US)
I am trying to set up a multi boot environment that uses only grub to select between linux, mac os 10.7, and windows 7.
I wish to make my setup a full UEFI boot which should be ok considering my systems firmware version.
I have properly setup an ESP and wish to use it to hold grub and any components grub requires to boot. 
At the moment I have Ubuntu installed on my hard drive in its own partition, but I broke it because I removed the hybrid protective master boot record (again because I wish to use a full EFI boot).

Here is roughly the steps I have used to try and install grub. I start by booting into an Ubuntu live CD, I then mount my Ubuntu partition to /mnt/ubuntu. With my linux system mounted, I mount the ESP to /mnt/ubuntu/boot/efi and mount the special file systems (proc, dev, sys). Once I have finished mounting the required parts of my system I chroot to /mnt/ubuntu

(Please excuse this if it is wrong i'm doing this from memory)
Now this is where I am confused. As I understand, grub-install cannot be used to install an efi version of grub so I use:
grub-mkimage -d /usr/local/lib/grub/x86_64 -p /boot/efi/efi/grub -o /boot/efi/efi/grub/grub.efi -O x86_64 `cat <file that contains a list of all the modules with out .mod>`

After running the grub-mkimage command I have an efi binary in my ESP that I am able to boot. When I boot into grub I am printed with a grub command prompt and I am able to load a grub config file (I used grub-mkconfig to make this file and it seems to have detected all of my operating systems but I still am not able to use it to boot any of my systems, also I am familiar with bash scripting so I expect to either modify this file at some point or make my own config) 
At the grub command prompt I am able to try some other commands but again I am unable to boot any of my operating systems.

I don't really know very much about grub (only what I have read in the grub manual or online) and did not ever install grub legacy by myself. I believe the following are my most direct questions (but i would appreciate any extra help to kinda give me better footing with grub and the rest of this):

-Where can I learn about the grub modules that I can load and figure out which ones I need?

-What is the format for loading grub modules? (I noticed the folder I point to in the mkimage command has the module files that end in (dot)mod, can i use a command like `ls *.mod` to load all the modules or does the .mod need to be removed from the name?)

-Are there more modules that I may need to load that are not in the grub folder? (are these modules like kernel modules? if so, do i need to load some specific kernel modules?)

-Once I have grub booting, how do i boot the operating system I wish to boot? Is there more information about the required commands? What steps do I need to use to get my mac system to boot? Is there a document, site, etc that I could use to get a better understanding of booting systems from grub? (again I read the manual and i was confused because the parts about booting were either incomplete or over my head)

Is anything in grub like grub legacy? I know there is a lot of information about the previous version of grub, would it be worth my time to read any of it or are the two too different?

Thanks for your time and I'm sorry if this email is a little confusing, if there is anything unclear or something more I can add to help you guys help me please let me know. 

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