Re: Creating an (Apple) EFI bootable media

[Michal Suchanek]

2009/10/1 Bean <address@hidden>:
> On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 11:17 PM, Michal Suchanek <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hello
>>
>> Is there a way to reproducibly create Grub bootable media (CD, USB
>> stick) that can be used with Apple efi?
>>
>> I tried some ways of blessing the boot loader which I found on the net
>> but none works.
>
> Hi,
>
> You should format it as GPT, MBR may not work. The fs of choice is
> hfsplus, although I heard someone have successful boot with FAT.
>
> To bless the disk, use something like this: (only available for hfsplus)
>
> sudo bless --folder=/Volumes/USBDISK --file=/Volumes/USBDISK/efi/grub/grub.efi

That's what I use and what can be found on varoius forums and wikis.

It works neither with rEFIt nor grub for me. Perhaps I am not using
the = character, I should check that but bless does not report any
error and it actually changes the information (there is another bless
option to show the state).

>
> bless writes the location of boot file to the hfsplus header. bless
> doesn't work on FAT.
>
> At startup, you need to press the Option key to show startup disk, and
> select the usb disk.

The disk does not show in the options offered by the firmware.

>
> The following command writes the boot device to nvram so that it's
> used by default:
>
> sudo bless --folder=/Volumes/USBDISK
> --file=/Volumes/USBDISK/efi/grub/grub.efi --setBoot

As I understand it this is not required for hfsplus, only for fat
which cannot be blessed permanently.
It makes no difference either way.

>
>>
>> Also the default core image probably lacks some essential parts. I
>> managed to load it as rEFIt shell command by placing it in the tools
>> directory but it complained about "prefix" not being defined and I
>> seemingly had no commands - the help command was not available, and
>> pressing tab did not show anything.
>
> You can add the command to the generated EFI image with grub-mkimage,
> here are the list of modules I usually use:
>
> ./grub-mkimage -d . -o grub64.efi minicmd part_gpt part_msdos
> part_apple fat ext2 hfsplus hfs ntfs reiserfs xfs iso9660 udf ls
> search loopback linux chain reboot halt appleldr help configfile
> hexdump loadbios memrw fixvideo crc sh video efi_fb gfxterm font png
> coreui loadcfg menutest gfxmenu textmenu

Hmm, I'm probably missing the shell or something. Can't the
installation pre-create an efi image that contains most options? AFAIK
the size of the image is not of much concern on efi so creating a
mostly complete image would simplify things.

Thanks

Michal