[H-GEN] Dual boot MacBook

[gavin duley]

Hello,

On 7 Mar 2011, at 23:36, Arjen Lentz wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> I managed to get a new hard disc for my MacBook, and got it to boot  
>> to
>> the OS X installer. Just restoring the system from a TimeMachine
>> backup now (this is taking 5hrs to restore ~150GB of data... ouch).
>
> Easiest way to upgrade a Mac HD is to swap and attach the old one to  
> an external USB-SATA bracket. You can boot from it by pressing the  
> right key on boot (never remember which but a google search should  
> sort that), copy inside OSX, reboot and bless the new disk, and  
> you're set.
> Generally way faster than restores, particularly TimeMachine tends  
> to be slooow.

I didn't have much choice, the old disk was dead.

I ended up doing a fresh install and then restoring from TimeMachine  
after that. Oddly, when I attempted to restore from TimeMachine from  
within the OS X installer, the resulting system wouldn't boot. It's  
always worked in the past...

>> Since the new hdd is 500GB, I'm planning to dual boot OS X and  
>> Ubuntu.
>> I'd like a data partition that both OSes can access. It seems my
>> choices are
>>
>> * HFS+ with journaling disabled
>> * fat32
>>
>> Which is the least worst? ;-)
>>
>> Any other tips or things too look out for would be appreciated...
>
> I've got my spare MacBook in dualboot and it can access the OSX  
> partition which of course has journaling enabled. Haven't tried  
> writing though (and don't have it handy right now) but it didn't  
> look funny in the mount. Running Ubuntu Maverick (10.10).

By default, it mounts HFS+ (Journaled) discs as read-only. You can  
enable write-access by forcing this on mount, but apparently this  
risks corrupting data.

> Wasn't OSX now able to access ZFS? That might be another option then?

Sadly, no. Looks like they started to implement it, then stopped:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Mac_OS_X

This may have been due to licensing issues:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/10/apple-abandons-zfs-on-mac-os-x-project-over-licensing-issues.ars

> But, as a general hint: dualboots tend to not be. Dualbooted that  
> is. It's annoying to logout and restart. It's ok for transitional  
> but you'll want to make up your mind quickly - it's not productive  
> to keep working switching between the two all the time.

No, I guess not. I used to dual boot between Linux and Windows, that  
was always a pain (there always seemed to be some bit of hardware that  
would only work under Windows...). I'll probably end up using Ubuntu  
the majority of the time.

I guess that most of the time I'll use Ubuntu. I'll probably just use  
ext4 for that and forget the shared partition. I'll install something  
like this

https://github.com/gerard/ext4fuse

so that I can grab files off the ext4 partitions from Mac OS X  
(mounted read-only) if I ever need to.

> My spare macbook was an experiment; I bought a 128GB SSD and after  
> my move next week I intend to find my external bracket and sort it  
> so the macbook runs only pure Ubuntu on the SSD. It may require a  
> little OSX for rEFIt convenience but I've read that there are  
> alternatives for that also including pure EFI boot for Linux. But  
> we'll see. I don't want to be stuffing around with it for ages.

Okay, thanks. I've read it's possible to boot Linux using EFI rather  
than BIOS emulation. I'll probably look into this too...

Thanks,

gavin,

-- 
Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you  
don't say 'What kind of tea?'
		-- Neil Gaiman

Gavin Duley
<gavin at microcomaustralia.com.au> <gpd at sdf-eu.org>
WWW: http://www.gavinduley.org/