Hey guys! Imagine this situation: you have you your Mac over here and you're trying
to boot some other operating system (e.g Linux). I have a hard drive
with Linux, I plug it all here and I expect it to boot fine.
I've installed the rEFInd bootloader there
I actually have a video about the rEFInd boot loader - you can watch it.
Okay, let's power the Macbook and see what happens
The rEFInd menu appears and let me select the Linux here
and let's see what happens. You can see that nothing
actually happens. It just shows the blinking cursor. And the reason for that is
that we have problems with the boot loader here - with the EFI boot loader
that is located on this hard drive. Let's rescue that Linux installation
We are going to use other utility to do that and I'm going to show what we need to do exactly
Ok, we realized that we need to do something to be able to boot into our Linux
installation. How to do that?
Well, we are going to use an external flash drive with antiX Linux which has the ability
to find EFI and BIOS boot records
on your hard drive, including external hard drives
We first need to download it. I'm on my Mac
I'm going to download it from here
Pick any option that you like here
I actually used a torrent option here
The second thing you need to do
is to plug a flash drive to your computer and format it
I will be using a Disk Utility which is included with any Mac
You should press "Erase" on that flash drive
Be careful, you need to select an MS-DOS FAT here
To actually format it for MSDOS
The name is going to be "LINUXRESC" for example. Pick any name you want
Now it's going to erase your flash drive
It successfully formatted your flash drive
Now we are going to use "unetbootin" utility
You can also download it from the internet
It's not my favorite utility because the interface is not great
But I use it to flash any Distros or any Images on my flash drive
First it asks to type your password. Just type it here
Since we have formatted our flash drive for FAT32 it already determined our disk
disk2s1. You might have other configuration there
Sometimes it doesn't work if you have another file system there
That's why I highly recommend to use the FAT32. Pick ISO image over there
Press this button over here to select full path to ISO. We are going to pick our installation there
We are going to write all those files on our thumb drive
And the part that I don't like
Is that it doesn't automatically formats the drive
It doesn't format to FAT32 or any other file system (or ext3/ext4 if it's Linux)
It doesn't automatically do that, so you need to manually format it like I shown
in the Disk Utility or any other utility
But it still functions and I'm probably going to make a
video about different possible utilities to create Linux images on Mac or any
other operating systems for the flash drive
In this dialog it asks about overwriting files, I just click "Yes" there
Now we are ready to reboot and use it to boot to our Linux installation from
the external hard drive
Let's try it. I have my Linux hard drive attached
You also might have an internal hard drive with Linux, either way it should work
I'm going to plug my flash drive and let's see
We have much more boot options and I select this file there from the flash drive
Select this one from the rEFInd menu (or "Option" key menu if you are not using rEFInd)
Select "Boot Rescue Menus" at the bottom
Select "Find GRUB menus" there
We need to find GRUB menus on our hard drives
It found hd5, gpt2 - and this is actually the partition that we need
I will press "Enter" and it's going to load it from my drive
Let's see, it should load the Linux from the external SSD now
As you can see it's loading Kubuntu which is exactly what I expected
It booted the bootloader from rescue flash drive and then diverted the boot process to external hard drive
This system had a GRUB installed there, so it worked fine
If you want to install the bootloader on Mac it's a different procedure
But this process is good enough if you have a hard drive from another computer
and you want to load your Linux on Mac easily when needed by using antiX Linux boot rescue options
I hope this video was useful for you!
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Thank you for watching and see you soon!