Posts Tagged “Windows”

About 3 years ago, someone my wife (well at that time, just my fiancee) worked with at Sam’s Club got a steal of a deal on a computer that was a display model (or someone returned because Sam’s would take back anything… but that is another story). I was attempting to work on her old computer (Dell Optiplex w/ Pentium II) which ended up having a bad hard drive, when she found this mini HP desktop system. I actually thought it was pretty cool myself. I made some backup install discs (from the wonderful restore partition that HP has) since it had come with no discs or documentation, did a factory restore, and cleaned off the usual crap that comes on new PCs. I even went so far as to install Avast! antivirus (free), Ad-aware (free), and Spybot S&D (free), and Firefox (of course, free), and left a note on the desktop explaining that these utilities were FREE, and how to use them.

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Introduction

Intel Macs use EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) instead of the typical BIOS (Basic Input / Output System) that most PCs use. EFI has a standardized specification that, unfortunately, Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decided that they do not need to abide by, and slightly modified their implementation. This makes developing Linux software that interfaces with this system difficult. In fact, there is, as of yet, no reliable method of booting Linux directly through EFI although work is being done by the mactel-linux group, elilo, and Grub2 to allow for this functionality. Part of this system is the use of a partitioning system called GPT (GUID Partition Table) which is used in place of the MBR (Master Boot Record) that would coincide with the use of a BIOS. NOTE: GUID means Globally Unique Identifier, which is basically a unique number that is used to identify something, a partition in this case. There is not much more that is needed to understand about that. Apple also places an “EFI partition” at the very beginning of the disc. This is used as a location to place executables for the EFI system to perform firmware updates. Read the rest of this entry »

This question gets asked a lot, especially since people are having non-functioning keyboards in Linux Bootloaders (Windows too). If you make room on your Intel Mac to boot Windows and Linux, most distros will now detect windows and add an entry to grub and/or lilo, and install the bootloader to the MBR (Master Boot Record) of your disk. This is ok on most PCs, as there is not normally any other way to choose which OS you want when booting up. However, most Mactel multibooters are using rEFIt to select the OS, and there is no need to use grub for anything but Linux (and hopefully, a EFI native bootloader will be available someday to replace that).

The way to get around this annoyance is to install your Linux bootloader to the root partition (or your /boot partition if you have one), and leave the normal Windows bootloader in the MBR. I use Ubuntu and Grub, and will focus there, but these general instructions should work for any system.

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