Repartition For Linux Install Alongside Mac

So the OS using the unchanged partition table will mess things up on your new partition layout.

Repartition For Linux Install Alongside Mac

How much truth is there to this If I were to run the Mint iso, would I still have the option to install alongside Mac OS X Would it just partition the drive like it normally does As much as Id rather run something newer than Lion, there are issues using Linux as my sole OS on this machine (primarily when going into standbyclosing the laptopbattery life).

I dont want to corrupt my Lion install but I have a huge hard drive and my little core2duo isnt powerful enough to virtualize anything substantial.

And if I were to go ahead with this, would the Linux GRUB take over like it usually does (This is my desired outcome).

After trying for hours to get OS X installed on a blank hard drive, I had to go to the Apple store for them to do it.

Ideally I would pull the hard drive, pop it into a similar PC and run the install then put it back in the MacBook).

If it were any other PC itd be done already, but Id hate to corrupt my current install because of something Apple did to complicate things.

Is that your model:.

If so, there is the quirk that the EFI is 32-bit (though the CPU is 64 bit) Its preferable to use OSXs disk utility to resize the OSX partition and leave room for the linux install.

Linux tools dont play well with hfs partitions as far as I know.

Im not sure Disk utility on Lion has the possibility to resize partitions, I think this option came with later OSX versions.

If you have an USB or DVD of OSX10.9 that should do.

For the install itself, you have two options: - install in LegacyBIOS mode.

Im not really experienced with this, but I think there are good ubuntu wiki pages.

EFI mode.

Thats a bit more difficult because the EFI is 32-bit, and Mint 32-bit ISOs do not include an EFI bootloader unfortunately, last time I checked.

So after burning the ISO to USB, you need to find grubia32.efi on the web and put it on the USB at EFIbootia32.efi.

Then you should be able to boot the USB by pressing alt during boot to access the apple boot manager which will give you an entry called EFI Boot with the icon of an external disk.

It appears I CAN resize the mac partition using disk utility, so I may end up doing that and then installing MintUbuntu on the unallocated portion of it.

If I install to the empty partition using ubiquity, will it automatically make a GRUB for me to boot into Linux with Ive had an Ubuntu 16 hard drive in this Mac from another machine (similar chipset HP compaq) and its worked more than fine.

Edit: I did the partitioning, did a DD clone from my old hdd to the new partition, fixed some network issues and GRUBrEFInd and it all worked out.

Only possible troubles: - if you install linux in LegacyBIOS mode, as far as I understand you need the disk to be formatted in hybrid MBR.

Still as far as I understand, disk utility will do this automatically if you create FAT32 partitions on the drive.

So I think the way to go is to create the partition layout you want from OSX, and then just reformat the partitions to the good filesystem with linux.

After that, you should probably never change the partition layout, unless you are looking for troubles.

Reason is that you will have two different partition tables: the GPT one, seen by OSX, and the MBR one seen by linux (though some linux utility like gdisk will be able to see both partition tables).

If you change the partitions with one tool, it will change one of the tables but not the other.

How To Repartition Mac Os X For Linux