Ubuntu – Installing Ubuntu 13.04 on MacBook Air (Mid 2012) [HELP]

13.0413.10installationmacbookpartitioning

Yesterday I've decided to try Ubuntu 13.04 on my MacBook Air, within a day i really love and enjoy it!

So, I followed every step by step instructions on the Internet. Installation process run just fine…

In "something else" section I make:

  • dev/sda1 efi
  • dev/sda2 ext4 /
  • dev/sda3 ext4 /home

After installation completed, I restart my Mac and nothing appear. Just white screen and folder with "question mark" on it.

I think I repeated my installation setup about 20 times, playing around with the "dev/sda" and the result still the same.

Right now my Mac doesn't have Operating System on it because I've deleted Mac OS X and doesn't have a backup files/system.

Can anyone help or guide me how am I supposed to do. Thanks in advance 🙁

[UPDATE]

Just want to update my post, currently running Ubuntu 13.10 without no errors! Thanks to this website and Google of course 😉

I am using MacBook Air (2012) so, I have to download the .iso specifically design for mac, here it is http://releases.ubuntu.com/saucy/ and make sure to select "version+mac" iso version.

In the installations section, select "something else" and I did this

  • dev/sda1 /boot 500mb
  • dev/sda2 / 20000mb
  • dev/sda3 swap area 4000mb
  • dev/sda4 /home whatever left memory

Everything's work smoothly.

Best Answer

If you plan to install OS X on the computer in the future, do so now. OS X includes tools for managing boot loaders on a Mac that are more-or-less necessary for managing the boot process in EFI mode. Once you've re-installed OS X, you can install rEFInd or use bless to register GRUB as a valid boot loader.

If you want the computer to be a Linux-only system, I have two suggestions; try whichever sounds best to you:

  • Download the USB flash drive version of my rEFInd boot manager and write it to a USB flash drive. Try booting Linux using that. If it works, copy the entire contents of the USB flash drive to your /dev/sda1 EFI System Partition (ESP) and see if you can boot without the flash drive. If this works, leave it that way.
  • Use gdisk (in the gdisk package) to convert the partition table from GPT to MBR: Type sudo gdisk /dev/sda, then type r to enter the recovery & transformation menu, then type g to convert to MBR and answer the prompts. When you're done, reboot into an emergency system and re-install GRUB. This process will convert the system to boot in BIOS mode rather than in EFI mode. A Linux-only install on a Mac is likely to be easier to manage in BIOS mode than in EFI mode.
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