I've a MacBook Air that has burned out three hard drives from OWC. The original drive is gone somewhere, and it no longer makes sense to purchase a replacement. The rest of the hardware is in good order.
My question is, is there a linux disto that I can boot off of a usb (or an sd)? I'm not dual booting (there's no hard drive) and reFit isn't an option either.
Most of what I've read assumes that a local hard drive is available. There isn't in this case.
Starting to answer my own question now. I've got reFit booting from a USB, now I'm wondering what needs to be done for reFit to boot a linux distro from another USB. (Or, should the single USB contain both? refit and the distro?)
Best Answer
I think it may be possible. I only have 2x iMac's, and I don't really want to pull the HDD out of either of them to test. However, that being said, a Mac system uses EFI rather than BIOS so you would need a Linux distro that has support for EFI.
I am a hardcore Debian user, so this would work with both Debian and Ubuntu.
Some things to decide:
Once you have decided this, fill in the blanks with what you need:
/efi/boot
directory on this drive/efi/boot
directoryISO
file to the/efi/boot
directory and rename it toboot.iso
Reboot your Mac with the USB in and hold down Alt/Option key when booting and you should be presented with a USB drive to select to boot from.