Boot Guid Disk on Bad Axe 2 with Linux & Grub

[joelones]

As the title says, this is the only method I found to boot a Guid Disk on a Bad Axe 2 board. As of yet no other solutions have been made available.

 

Requirements:

• Ubuntu Linux 7.10
  
• BrazilMac Pre Patched DVD
  
• Another Leopard install and or usb stick (fat32) formatted
  
• pc_efi_v80 package
  
• Some time...
  

This is the process I used.

 

1.) Boot into either Leopard / Tiger or the Leopard DVD and format the target disk as Guid Partition Scheme, you can partition it into three partitions if you like. The first, HFS+ other two FAT (one for the linux root mount point and the other for the Linux Swap)

 

2.) Boot the Ubuntu install cd and click the Install icon on the desktop once it's fully booted up. This will begin the install.

 

3.) Select the defaults until you reach the Partition step. Select Manual. Install Linux onto the second partition, format it as ext3 and select the mount point / (root). Do the same for the third partition and set it as Linux swap. Once the install completes you will be able to reboot and see the grub menu. So grub will see the following partition layout:

• (hd0) as the efi partition
  
• (hd1) as the HFS+ (Leopard partition)
  
• (hd2) as the ext Linux partition
  
• (hd3) as the swap partition
  

4.) Now, using whatever method you are most comfortable with, install Leopard (I used the Leopard pre patched dvd, yes, i know takes forever to boot) and install it to the first partiton. Once installed, prep it for EFI. I am assuming you all know how. Replace mach_kernel and Kexts (dsmos.kext, AppleSMBIOS.kext, NVinject.kext, IONetworkingFamily fix, etc).

 

5.) Put boot_v8 from the pc_efi_v80 package onto a fat formatted usb disk and boot into the newly installed ubuntu linux (This may not be necessary as you may be able to read this file from a HFS+ partition, in any case).

 

6.) Open up a terminal. Run these commands (I am doing this from memory so don't quote me) assuming the usb is mounted on /media/usbdisk. In this step I use vi to edit the file, if you are not comfortable with vi you can use nano, i.e.: nano menu.lst.

 

sudo -s

cd /boot/

cp /media/usbdisk/boot_v8 .

cd grub

vi menu.lst

 

Adding the following lines to this file

 

title Darwin

kernel (hd0,2)/boot/boot_v8

 

Assuming (hd0,2) is where you install linux as it was for me. You can tweak other things in this file like the timeout and the default partition to boot (you can do this later once you confident that your leopard install works).

 

7.) Reboot, hit Esc once you see the grub menu. Hit Darwin, and if all goes well you will boot into Leopard.

 

Hope this helps.

All the best.

[dougaa]

Thanks Joelones. That method works well for me. I just have one problem. When I have more than one Leopard partition (on the same disk), there doesn't seem to be any way to pick which one I want to boot. Netkas's Readme file for pc_efi seems to say it should ask me which partition I want to boot, but that never happens. It just picks one to boot, without any prompt.