Booting Gentoo on a late 2007 macbook does not work

k_klunz

Hello everyone,

because I got tired of my rather old OSX 10.5, this weekend I started to read into installing Gentoo on my old macbook.
Its a late 2007 model.
I want to do a gentoo only install, so no multi-booting required.
As I did not find a guide, i searched around a bit and finally did the following steps:

1.) I followed the instructions provided by david-e in this thread: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-697296-start-0.html
-delete the whole disk with diskutils and make it mbr
-bless it

2.) Following the instructions in the gentoo handbook.
I used fdisk to partition the disks in exactly the same way as described there and also did everything else as described there.
The only thing I did different was, that when installing grub I did not do

djdunn · l33t Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 810

with the macbooks certain years have certain qwirks that you have to research

looks like you probably have your MBR messed up
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k_klunz · Posted: Thu May 03, 2012 8:19 am Post subject:

Thank you very much for your response.

Apparently what I did wrong was to alter the mbr when creating the partitions with fdisk. However, mbr and gpt were out of sync after that, as fdisk doesnt know about the gpt.
As the macbook always looks at the gpt, it could not find my boot-partition, which was only known to the mbr.

So I guess what i will try next is to create all necessary partitions with the OSX-dvd diskutil, which will write synced gpt and mbr.
During the installation I will then not touch the partition table anymore and only reformat the drives to the needed filesystems....

Hopefully this will work, otherwise I guess I will just have to do some more researching ...

Greetings
tobe

k_klunz · Posted: Fri May 04, 2012 7:35 am Post subject:

Just as a small update:

After tinkering around for 2 more nights and not getting a bit closer to simply getting the system to boot, I am afraid I have to give up.
So the next try will be to install Ubuntu on a small partition, see if that works for itself, then installing Gentoo on the rest of the HDD and let ubunt handle the grub /boot stuff.

UPDATE:
With the described setup everything now works flawlessly (except of course, that I know have a 10GB Ubuntu partition :roll:

).
Still no idea why I could not get it running before.....
UPDATE END

Over the years I have done at least 10 gentoo installations on many different systems, with and without dual-boot. Of course there were problems, but they were allways traceable and solveable.
It absolutly amazes me that 8 years after my first experience with gentoo stuff has actually gotten way more complicated.
As it seems, this is mostly due to incredibly stuipd developments in the industry in general (EFI) and hardware manufacturers complicating stuff for no reason at all (Apple) ....

Sorry for the rant, just a little frustrated atm....

Greetings
tobe