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A coworker tried to install Fedora 16 to a MacBook Air from the Live CD. The install completed without any errors, but after rebooting, the MacBook displayed a blinking folder with question-mark. Are there any known problems with installing the bootloader on Macs? Is there anything that we could try to provide more information?
I should add that he used the "Use All Space" option. Also, I think that this might be related to bug #746895 and bug #746901. Fortunately, we were able to find a workaround: installation succeeded with the "nogpt" option added to the kernel command-line from the live boot CD. Should this workaround be added to the Fedora 16 Common Bugs page?
This is only an effective workaround if Mac OS X is not going to be used at all. The resulting partition scheme disallows dual-boot Fedora + Mac OS. The Use All Space option has blown away the contents of the target disk in favor of Fedora only, and the nogpt option has created an MBR disk (an msdos label disk in parted terminology). While Mac OS X can be booted from an MBR disk, the Mac OS X installer will refuse to install on anything but a GPT disk. There is also a possible consequence that it will not be possible to apply Apple firmware updates for this computer unless its primary disk is GPT and also contains an EFI System partition to stage the firmware update. This bug is a duplicate of bug 746901.
This system didn't have an EFI system partition (maybe someone obliterated it previously), so I'm not sure that everything in bug 746901 applies. Maybe it does. I did see bug 746901, but I couldn't follow the instructions because the live cd refused to boot when the system was half-installed (a separate issue entirely). In any case, it would be really nice to have a clear description and some detailed instructions on the Fedora 16 Common Bugs page. This coworker was trying Fedora for the first time, and I must say, he wasn't very impressed.
Apple hardware is a challenge because on the one hand it has a non-standard EFI (it is not UEFI 2.x but rather is based on Intel EFI 1.10). The activation of the Compatibility Support Module (CSM) to support a BIOS based installation of Fedora (or any other non-Apple system) requires three things to be true which are listed in bug 746901. The nogpt option works in your case because it causes all three requirements to get Apple's EFI implementation to activate the CSM for a BIOS based boot. By default, without the nogpt option, the disk is formatted GPT without a hybrid MBR and therefore the computer isn't bootable. The problem with the hybrid MBR is that it's a violation of the UEFI spec, and inherently fragile so while Fedora could apply gptsync postinstall to create a hybrid MBR, it's still a non-standard and tricky situation for them to get involved in and then support. The long term solution is Apple should issue firmware which fully supports UEFI 2.x, which they presently do not and has all kinds of other consequences to running any linux distribution, including power management related issues. This same problem occurs with Windows on Apple hardware, BTW. >I did see bug 746901, but I couldn't follow the instructions because the live >cd refused to boot when the system was half-installed (a separate issue >entirely). In your first post you said the installation completed fine and without error. So I don't understand why the LiveCD is refusing to boot. Are you holding down the option key at the startup chime? Which labeled icon are you choosing to boot from?
Thank you for the information. Apple's quirks can really be confusing. To clarify, I'll describe what we did as a sequence: 1) When we ran the LiveCD the first time, everything installed without errors. 2) We then rebooted and got the blinking folder with a question mark. 3) We then rebooted into the LiveCD, and about the time X was starting, it showed some error message, and we couldn't get a working GNOME session. We rebooted a few times and had the same problem each time. 4) We rebooted into the LiveCD and manually entered single user mode and tried to clear the boot flag on /boot (a problem mentioned in one of these bugs), but it still didn't work. 5) Again, we couldn't get a working GNOME session. 6) We rebooted into the LiveCD and manually entered single user mode and ran a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda". 7) We rebooted into the LiveCD with nogpt and were able to install with Anaconda. 8) Finally, we were able to boot into the installed Fedora system. It was weird.
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Fedora 16 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2013-02-12. Fedora 16 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.