MacBook – Remove GRUB & Edit Boot Loader Records

1) Resize your OSX Partition, leave the space created as freespace (i.e don't create any partition)

2) Write the iso to USB and boot it (take the most recent image from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com)

3) Create ext4 for / where the freespace was created, use sda1 (osx: disk1s1) or use another EFI if you have more then 1 drive and you want to use the second for linux only - in short: use the EFI partition as the "bootloader" partition

4) Install Ubuntu (or any other distro) - but watch for the bootloader, if you don't want to use grub (care to elaborate, why?) you need to rebless the volume in os'x to boot through the normal bootscreen where you can hold ALT to fire linux.

I don't know what you want to achieve with that, since having grub is basically the same, and you will be loading grub from that screen anyways since you need to load the kernel somehow - guess there are other options but I never used them, just went with grub.

What I mean is that after you select the other partition with the normal bootscreen by holding ALT, you will load grub - since you must load the kernel, and there is now way to load it directly from that screen other then using MBR which even makes less sense since it's a UEFI system ;-)

note: I strongly advise you to use refit - it's a very good solution and has some extra functionality that will make multi-os setup's boot better.

If you don't like it, just rebless the volume in os x and you get rid of it. bless is a system command- however in the new os x there is:

sudo systemsetup -liststartupdisks

and to setup back any Volume as the sys volume use:

sudo systemsetup -setstartupdisk /Volumes/YOUR_SYS_VOLUME_NAME

to check if it worked:

sudo systemsetup -getstartupdisk

So even if something goes FUBAR with the bootloader, it won't be any problem.

Why would you reinstall os x or anything else to boot linux on a Mac?!? Anyone doing reinstallations to boot linux is just a windows impared user who does not know how unix works, what gpt is and thinks of EFI as fancy bios.

A bit late but I hope this can help someone. I have a 2,1 (mid-2007) macbook that refuses to boot from anything that isn't an Mac OS X installer. The DVD drive is dead which is a problem that I suspect its common on old laptops. It also refused to boot a 32 bit linux installer from external DVD drive. With and without refind.

Anyway I've managed to install Ubuntu 16 LTS using a weird method that can vary from distro to distro. It might also work on *BSD as long as refind has a driver to read its partition. In any case you will need some advanced knowledge about whatever you are trying to install.

• Have Mac OS X Lion on a bare minimum partition. I think 20GB is enough. You'll have to live with that on your drive and stuff like firmware updates can make a difference so I recommend installing all the Lion upates.

• Install refind. Be sure to include the correct driver (or all the drivers with the --alldrivers option).

• Create a partition using the remaining space. I don't think you can create empty partitions with diskutil. Other tools like fdisk and gpart might work but in the end you just need a partition. In my case that partition was /dev/disk0s4.

• Make sure to unmount that partition. You can dd some zeroes into it to prevent Mac OS X from mounting it again.

• Install virtualbox. The latest version that can work on Lion is 4.3.40.

• Chown the partition to current user. This is required for the next step.

• Create a VMDK from our partition's block device. In my case the command was "VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /Users/ulzeraj/VirtualBox\ VMs/rootfs.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0s4"

• Create a virtual machine using the raw vmdk as its virtual disk and install your desired 32 bit Linux distribution as if you were installing a simple VM. The only catch is to install it on /dev/sda (no partitions - remember that you are already inside a partition). I can guess that some installers might not be happy with this. The installer may also complain about not using swap but you can fix this later.

I've used Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I had to use the livecd mode to format /dev/sda as EXT4. When prompted about where to install a boot loader I've selected to continue without a bootloader.

If everything went fine refind will detect your new OS and boot it by running the kernel. Legacy mode doesn't work because we don't have a boot loader.