Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 227263
Problem with partition table on an intel mac
Last modified: 2013-01-09 23:11:34 EST
Hello I've recently tried to get Linux installed on my macbook. It's the latest revision with a core 2 duo CPU. The problem is with the dual MBR/GPT partiton table. When I create the root and swap partitions everything seems to work and the installations succeeds. But the system refuses to boot and the rEFIt bootloader and Apples built in bootloader thinks the root partition is a windows leagacy partition (ie. FAT32). Fedora is not alone with this problem. First I tried to get opensuse installed. Opensuse, unlike fedora it seems, doesn't automatically sync the GPT and MBR partition tables so I had to do that myself and this is the output: /root # ./gptsync /dev/sda Current GPT partition table: # Start LBA End LBA Type 1 40 409639 EFI System (FAT) 2 409640 134627367 Mac OS X HFS+ 3 134627368 135701055 Basic Data 4 135701056 156301454 EFI System (FAT) Current MBR partition table: # A Start LBA End LBA Type 1 1 156301487 ee EFI Protective Status: MBR table must be updated. Proposed new MBR partition table: # A Start LBA End LBA Type 1 1 409639 ee EFI Protective 2 409640 134627367 af Mac OS X HFS+ 3 * 134627368 135701055 0b FAT32 4 135701056 156301454 ef EFI System (FAT) May I update the MBR as printed above? [y/N] n No As you can see partitions 3 and 4 are not listed as swap and ext3. If you want I can reinstall fedora and post the fdisk output from it, which should show something similar. A workaround that I found on the ubuntu forums is to not create a swap partition. If I only create the root everything works and Linux boots. The version I'm trying to install is fc7test but I guess other versions would suffer from the same problem as all distributions I've tried does.
Fedora 7 test bugs should be filed against "devel", not against test1/2/3. This isn't obvious, I know. Moving this report so it isn't lost. This is a bulk message -- I apologize if this was actually meant to be targeted against a different release. If so, please fix or let me know. Thanks.
Based on the date this bug was created, it appears to have been reported against rawhide during the development of a Fedora release that is no longer maintained. In order to refocus our efforts as a project we are flagging all of the open bugs for releases which are no longer maintained. If this bug remains in NEEDINFO thirty (30) days from now, we will automatically close it. If you can reproduce this bug in a maintained Fedora version (7, 8, or rawhide), please change this bug to the respective version and change the status to ASSIGNED. (If you're unable to change the bug's version or status, add a comment to the bug and someone will change it for you.) Thanks for your help, and we apologize again that we haven't handled these issues to this point. The process we're following is outlined here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/F9CleanUp We will be following the process here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping to ensure this doesn't happen again.
Installs to intel mac hardware have been working for a while now, closing this bug.