Dual boot Ubuntu 14.04 on a MacBook Pro

bootefigrubpartitionunix

so after a few hours of Google searching and too many headaches with a broken GPT, I've turned here.

I have a 2012 MacBook Pro (9,2) that I want to dualboot OS X 10.9 and Ubuntu 14.04 on. I've read through all the guides, whether they say to use a Hybrid MBR or create several unnecessary partitions or just use rEFIt/rEFInd, and I'm not sure the majority of the steps involved are necessary. From what I understand, Ubuntu/GRUB2 has supported EFI booting for a long time, and the OS X EFI by default allows for booting from any EFI-enabled partition it finds (as can be seen by burning any Linux live USB with the correct bootx64.efi file). My question is, why is it that every guide available says to use things like rEFInd or an unnecessary partitioning scheme? It seems like all I'd need to do is leave some space for Ubuntu, install it with its own efi boot partition (a normal thing regardless of the computer one is installing it on) and just load it like any other OS.

Feel free to call me out on being a moron, or to confirm my theory. Thanks!

Best Answer

Ubuntu has instructions for most macbook pro's. Depending on which version of the macbook pro you have you may not need rEFInd:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro

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I'll post this as an answer, even though it didn't fix my problem – this was a lost case in the end. Aftermath: I dd'ed a backup of the Windows partition to my OS X partition:

sudo dd bs=512 if=/dev/disk0 of=windows_backup skip=732993496 count=173955112

Now I had a 80 gig hex dump which I could examine safely. I used a hex editor to search for all kinds of metadata:

"NTFS" (encoded in ASCII) which starts a NTFS volume.
"FILE" (encoded in ASCII) which starts a file entry record in the $MFT or master file table in NTFS.
NTFS system file names (like "MFT", tried with little-endian UTF-16 and ASCII)

... and so on. But without success. I was able to find all kinds of data from the dump, but all the metadata, including the boot record (the first sector of the volume), the $Boot file (the first 15 sectors after the boot record), the $MFT file which keeps record of all the files on the file system, were gone.

The thing that baffles me that I couldn't even find $MFTMirr file, which is the backup file of the metadata files and stored halfway of the volume.

I was able to find a backup of the boot sector from its standard location, the last sector of the volume. However, the data was old, from the era before resizing the volume. The boot sector has stored the offset of the $MFT file metadata file, but inspecting the references was moot, there was nothing of value there.

In the end, I concluded that the volume was totally borked. The moral of the story? Hybrid Master Boot Record is evil. Also, it seems that the program that resized the volume did a subpar job, failing to update some of the metadata.

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