Re: Boot delay when using grub.efi on Mac Mini

[Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com>]

On 2009-03-14, Peter Cros <pxwpxw8@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 1:26 AM, Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com> wrote:
>
>>  1) Mac firmware not being able to boot from anything other
>>     than an HFS+ partion on a GPT partioned drive.
>
> I got curious and rechecked this -
> Here is grub.efi booting from usb msdos drive with hfsplus partition -

When I try that, I get one of two things:

 1) When it boots directly into grub, grub can only see hd0
    (which appears to be the USB drive), but it can't see any
    of the paritions on hd0.  Needless to say, it can't find
    it's config file.

 2) Holding down the Option key and selecting grub allows it to
    see both disks -- it can see partitions on the
    GPT-partitioned hard drive but not on the MS-DOS
    partitioned USB drive.  I can manually load a config-file
    from the hard drive, none of the menu entries work -- I see
    stuff like

       error: unknown command `initrd'

     or

       error: unkown command `search'     

Here's the info on the USB drive:

bash-3.2# diskutil list /dev/disk1
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *3.7 Gi     disk1
   1:                 DOS_FAT_32 minimyth                1.9 Gi     disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS mmhfs                   1.9 Gi     disk1s2

bash-3.2# bless --info /Volumes/mmhfs
finderinfo[0]:      2 => Blessed System Folder is /Volumes/mmhfs/
finderinfo[1]:    120 => Blessed System File is /Volumes/mmhfs/efi/grub/grub.efi
finderinfo[2]:      0 => Open-folder linked list empty
finderinfo[3]:      0 => No OS 9 + X blessed 9 folder
finderinfo[4]:      0 => Unused field unset
finderinfo[5]:      2 => OS X blessed folder is /Volumes/mmhfs/
64-bit VSDB volume id:  0xA3FBF66150DE9BB1

> --setBoot gives deafult fast boot to grub menu, but when booted that way,
> grub can only see its own disk (hd0)

Same here, and it can't see any of the partitions on that disk.

End result: still no luck booting from USB drive, just a larger
variety of failure modes.

-- 
Grant