[Fedora-livecd-list] Mac (EFI) USB booting

[Jeremy Katz]

On Monday, January 19 2009, Daire Byrne said:
> I have been trying to get Mac booting working but I am struggling to jump the first hurdle - 
> namely having the Mac recognise the USB drive as a bootable device. I have used ALT on boot to 
> list the bootable drives on both a Mac Mini and a PowerMac desktop machine but neither 
> recognise a USB stick created with livecd-tools. In fact after booting from the drive MacOSX 
> informs me that the drive isn't initialised and wants me to format it. Checking the partitions 
> in Linux they are laid out as expected with a bootable EFI partition vfat formatted.

PowerMacs (PPC) are an entirely different beast and there's not really
been any work done on getting them booting off of USB.

For the x86 based Macs, it can work, but it's definitely far from just
working everywhere right now.  The first question is if your machine is
32bit or 64bit EFI as we require matching x86 vs x86_64, respectively,
based on that.  Most of the original Core Duo stuff is 32bit EFI, the
newer is 64bit.  If you're using a 64bit EFI machine, right now, you're
out of luck -- the kernel even in Fedora 10 was broken with 64bit EFI :(

For 32bit, it _should_ work with Fedora 10.  But I don't think I've
actually tested it on one of the Minis, and sadly, the Apple firmware
has been notoriously bad about being buggy :)
 
> I gave up on EFI booting and even tried a classic MBR install with rEFIt but still the USB drive 
> is never detected. Is there another trick I'm missing here or does USB booting only work on a very 
> small subset of Intel Mac models? The recent EFI+MBR work looks interesting but like I said I can't 
> even get that far.

I never managed to get rEFIt to boot off of an MBR-based USB device.
Some people said they did, but I have no clue what they did to do so :)

Jeremy