Thread: Is it possible? Boot a Mac Mini from a USB thumb drive with Voyage MPD on it?

Originally Posted by ldolse

Yes, I don't think it's as simple as having a late model Mac, I was testing from a MacBook pro purchased this past November, shipped with Lion. I haven't messed with this since my last post in this thread, not sure if there have been any firmware updates that matter since then.

I haven´t really tried myself booting Voyage specifically, but I am fairly certain that it is the case nonetheless. I remember booting a Linux or Windows USB pendrive with my 2011 Mac, whilst my 2010 and 2006 model would not boot without rEFIt. Maybe Apple included BIOS-booting on the models without a DVD-ROM.

The procedure would be to boot from a USB DVD-ROM and install to a USB pendrive. (hint:you can install refit on a USB pen, just install it to a small HFS partition while you save the extra space for Linux).

O, so I went ahead and to prove the concept, dug out my live cd of Ubuntu 10.04, stuck it in an external USB, plugged that into the Mac mini, opened system pref and told it to start from that disk. Well, surprise, it did not work. "No bootable device -- Instert boot disk and press any key" is the message I got. So, assuming it would default to booting into osx, I turned the machine off and unplugged thre USB cd rom drive... Same thing. So now, it boots into nothing. How do I fix this?

Edit, I restarted while holding "option" and chose the Mac hd as the start up drive, and it worked. Thankfully...

I tried this on my MacBook Air and it works. I have only installed one OS on my MacBook Air and that is Mac OS X. On my MacBook Pro it doesn't work because I have installed Windows with Bootcamp on it. Obviously Bootcamp doesn't like that. There is actually a way of tricking it but I haven't tried it. So the following is the step by step procedure which worked for me.

1. Insert flash drive into the slot and open Disk Utility

2. Create a (Fat) partition on the flash drive

3. Open a Terminal and type:

diskutil list

This will come back with a list of your drives and they will look like this:

/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 120.5 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Voyage Linux 0.8 *7.9 GB disk1


Remember the disk location. e.g. in my case it is: /dev/disk1

3. Now unmount the disk,
either within the Disk Utility, right mouse on the disk volume and unmount it
or in the terminal type:
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk(number)

4. The actual creation of the bootable drive

in the terminal type:
dd if=(THE-ISO-FILE-NAME) of=/dev/disk(number) bs=1m

in my case: if=voyage-0.8.5.iso of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m

if you get an error with bs=1m, then use bs=1M instead.

It takes about a minute to create it. Then I restarted my MBA and held 'option' key it showed it as bootable drives. I noticed it didn't get an ip-address at the boot time. I typed then:

cd /root
dhclient eth0

and got the ip-address.

I didn't play with it though. I was looking for a Linux with Gui version. I want to replace my Mac OS X with it. So any suggestion is appreciated.

Cheers,
Dj

ok well, apparently selecting "Windows" when the "option" screen comes up, boots from the Ubuntu disk in the USB CDrom drive... but the lack of a wired keyboard seems to be a problem...

DJ, thanks for those instructions.

Alright, I tried those instruction DJ and got this every time.

dd: voyage-0.8.5.iso: No such file or directory

Originally Posted by AudioDoctor

Alright, I tried those instruction DJ and got this every time.

That's most likely because you ran dd while in a directory other than the one with the Voyage iso. Try the full path - if you're not sure what it is use drag and drop - type the command up to 'if=', and then grab the Voyage ISO file and drop it on the terminal.

Will give this technique a shot in a bit.

I was just about to try the drag and drop method...

edit: That worked, I was able to create the USB disk and boot into it, got to a voyage log in prompt.

I don't think it likes my wireless keyboard either.

Sorry, I forgot the path to the ISO file. I will edit the instruction.

Now with the login prompt you have to give 'root" as login and 'voyage' as password.

You need to set it up with a wired keyboard. It is not working out of the box. I am not sure if you could telnet to it from another Mac and set it up? It is a bit of work so that is why I didn't play with it.

Is your wireless keyboard Bluetooth? A USB wireless keyboard should be fine, but a bluetooth keyboard would require some additional work, odds are the various things you need to support that can be installed as packages, but not sure which ones.

AudioDoctor, I am not sure how verse you are with Linux?

Here is the guide Getting Started:

Getting Started (v0.8.x) | Voyage Linux

I am going to give it a shot tomorrow. As I said, it is not ready out of the box. You have to set it up. I installed Vortexbox yesterday and that one looked more ready out of the box.

Originally Posted by ldolse

Is your wireless keyboard Bluetooth? A USB wireless keyboard should be fine, but a bluetooth keyboard would require some additional work, odds are the various things you need to support that can be installed as packages, but not sure which ones.

It is of course the Apple wireless bluetooth keyboard... I am going to try and not worry about it for the weekend.

Originally Posted by Dj

AudioDoctor, I am not sure how verse you are with Linux?

Here is the guide Getting Started:

Getting Started (v0.8.x) | Voyage Linux

I am going to give it a shot tomorrow. As I said, it is not ready out of the box. You have to set it up. I installed Vortexbox yesterday and that one looked more ready out of the box.

yeah, I read the getting started guide. I have become more comfortable with linux over the last few months, but it still causes me to scratch my head more often than not. I can get it, I am sure.

Originally Posted by AudioDoctor

yeah, I read the getting started guide. I have become more comfortable with linux over the last few months, but it still causes me to scratch my head more often than not. I can get it, I am sure.

I am sure you can do it. Let us know about your progress.

I wasted 2 hours and realized that it is too much work. It is like inventing the wheel from scratch.

As I said Vortexbox was easier to run but it doesn't install on a Mac. :/

Glad that its sorted then. I believe you can just choose startup disk in OSX preferences if you want to boot up via the thumbdrive automatically without holding the option key at boot.

Originally Posted by AudioDoctor

ok well, apparently selecting "Windows" when the "option" screen comes up, boots from the Ubuntu disk in the USB CDrom drive... but the lack of a wired keyboard seems to be a problem...

Booting from a USB CDROM has always been supported in all mac.

Originally Posted by Dj

.

As I said Vortexbox was easier to run but it doesn't install on a Mac. :/

I see no reason that Vortexbox shouldnt work on a Mac.

Originally Posted by Bloodwound

I see no reason that Vortexbox shouldnt work on a Mac.

Created two bootable CDs and tried to boot it on my MacBook Pro, it didn't booted. I read somewhere Vortexbox is not installable on MacBook Pro. I tried it on an old PC and worked like a charm. However, the fan of the PC sounded like a helicopter is landing in my room so I gave up Vortexbox.

Dj, try making a USB-boot from the VortexBox ISO, install rEFIt on the mac (and verify that it works) Vortexbox should install fine. When you install GRUB, be sure to choose NOT to install it to the MBR, but rather on the partition where you have installed Vortexbox. That is because Mac already have a boot-manager built in. (press and hold alt-key when booting)

On another note, I just upgraded to Mountain Lion on a Mac mini 2011, it was just a couple of clicks and it installed itself automatically with me even looking at the screen. Because of that I don´t know for a fact if the firmware was upgraded or not. But it seems suddenly my Linux USB pendrive is bootable from the native mac boot manager. However another Linux USB pen was only bootable when using rEFIt. The only difference (as both are made with Unetbootin) it that the one that works is formatted using MBR and the one that doesnt boot uses GPT. Can anyone confirm? (btw my mac mini 2010 doesn´t work with neither)

Originally Posted by Bloodwound

Dj, try making a USB-boot from the VortexBox ISO, install rEFIt on the mac (and verify that it works) Vortexbox should install fine. When you install GRUB, be sure to choose NOT to install it to the MBR, but rather on the partition where you have installed Vortexbox. That is because Mac already have a boot-manager built in. (press and hold alt-key when booting)

On another note, I just upgraded to Mountain Lion on a Mac mini 2011, it was just a couple of clicks and it installed itself automatically with me even looking at the screen. Because of that I don´t know for a fact if the firmware was upgraded or not. But it seems suddenly my Linux USB pendrive is bootable from the native mac boot manager. However another Linux USB pen was only bootable when using rEFIt. The only difference (as both are made with Unetbootin) it that the one that works is formatted using MBR and the one that doesnt boot uses GPT. Can anyone confirm? (btw my mac mini 2010 doesn´t work with neither)

Don't know any particulars (which makes me dangerous), but just on a general level it seems quite odd that rEFIt, which is made to work with EFI/GPT, won't work with an otherwise bootable OS formatted with GPT.

Originally Posted by Jud

Don't know any particulars (which makes me dangerous), but just on a general level it seems quite odd that rEFIt, which is made to work with EFI/GPT, won't work with an otherwise bootable OS formatted with GPT.

You misunderstood me. I meant that rEFIt works with all kinds of drives. But the native Apple boot manager doesnt. At least when it comes to non-HFS+ formatted drives.