Trouble setting up EFI boot on Macbook Pro

Question

I've been running Arch as a single OS on my Macbook Pro 7.1 for a few months using the bios compatibility mode. I would like to try a pure EFI boot. The reason is that I have an OCZ Vertex II SSD that the MBP  fails to boot from, while booting works fine on an 4 y/o Dell Inspiron 6400. I suspect the   SATA running in IDE mode  on the MBP is the cause, and this wiki entry  suggests that under grub2 AHCI can be forced. Also the same page states that the TRIM feature in the kernel is not available in IDE mode.
I read the wiki pages on EFI, grub2 and this how-to http://grub.enbug.org/TestingOnMacbook, but some things are not clear to me:
- Do i need a separate 'EFI System' partition? If so what folder structure should it have and on which mount point should it be mounted? Does it need to be fat32?
- Do I need a  BIOS Boot Partition?
- The how to explains using  the 'Apple bootloader'. But isn't that what grub2 is?
- Do I need GPT for using EFI on a MBP?
- Do I need grub2-efi or does grub2 from core/community work well enough?
Last edited by rwd (2010-11-25 08:10:23)

Answer 1

Thanks for the tips skodabenz. I am getting some progress, in the sense that the Grub menu shows up. But selecting any item  results in black screen with a prompt in the top-left. These are the things that I've been trying, each time swapping harddisk with the SSD:
- following the tips on http://grub.enbug.org/TestingOnMacbook I verified that the firmware is 64 bit using the mac OSX cd.
- Also I changed the path of the the contents of /efi/efi/grub2_efi_x86_64_bzr to /efi/EFI/BOOT/
and renamed grub.efi to BOOTX64.EFI as that is where the firmware seems to expect it
- Furthermore since efi is on a separate partition I added  '/boot/' to the initrd  and kernel lines (see grub.cfg. below).
One or more of these changes made that I when booting with the alt key pressed I can get into the grub menu.  Just before the grub menu appears though I see an error message that is too quick to read. Something like "error 'prefix' ...". Selecting any item in the grub menu results in a prompt.
- To be sure that it wasn't a typo in grub.cfg I tried this within the chroot, and it doesn't show any errors:
cat /efi/EFI/BOOT/grub.cfg | /bin/grub2_efi_x86_64_bzr-script-check --verbose
- I then decided to compile more modules so I did:
grub2_efi_x86_64_bzr-mkimage -d /usr/lib/grub2_efi_x86_64_bzr/x86_64-efi -O x86_64-efi -p "" -o /efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI minicmd part_msdos part_gpt fat ext2 hfsplus ntfs reiserfs xfs iso9660 ls search loopback linux chain reboot halt appleldr help configfile hexdump loadbios fixvideo sh
- Still no boot, so I installed the 2.6.36-ck kernel from aur.
- Then I tried the ahci force tip mentioned in  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives
and added to menu items in the grub.cfg 'insmod setpci' and added to the menu items 'setpci -d 10de:0d85 90.b=40' with the pci id determined from 'lspci -nn'
A strange thing I noticed was that even though when booting from the SSD there is only one drive, when I press 'c' in the grub menu and then 'ls' I get this output, so now there is both a hd0 and hd1:
(hd0) (hd1) (hd1,gpt3) (hd1,gpt2) (hd1,gpt1) (cd0)
a 'ls (hd1,gpt2)' shows the contents of the partition that contains /boot. When I change the items in grub cfg to set 'root=(hd0,gpt2)' I get 'no such partition' error. When I change it to 'set root=(hd1,gpt2)' I get the black screen with a prompt. 
A little research showed the cause for this:
[root@arch-macbookpro boot]# cat /boot/grub2_efi_x86_64_bzr/device.map
(hd0) /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Hitachi_HTS545025B9SA02_100610PBL2003SKV6ZPV
(hd1) /dev/disk/by-id/usb-OCZ-VERT_EX2_FCF0FEFFEFFCF0F33F5231144FF5FD-0:0
I guess I have to change this file and reinstall grub2. Will post the results in a next post.
This is the grub.cfg so far. None of these menu items work:
# Example Config file for GRUB2 - The GNU GRand Unified Bootloader
# /boot/grub2_efi/grub.cfg.example
# DEVICE NAME CONVERSIONS
# Linux Grub
# /dev/fd0 (fd0)
# /dev/sda (hd0)
# /dev/sdb2 (hd1,2)
# /dev/sda3 (hd0,3)
# Load Graphical modules
set debug=video
insmod efi_gop
#insmod efi_uga
# Load Font module
insmod font
# Setup GFXTERM along with loading unifont.pf2 font file
if loadfont ${prefix}/unifont.pf2
then
insmod gfxterm
set gfxmode="auto"
set gfxpayload=keep
terminal_output gfxterm
set color_normal=light-blue/black
set color_highlight=light-cyan/blue
insmod png
insmod jpeg
# background_image ${prefix}/archlinux.png
fi
insmod part_gpt
insmod part_msdos
insmod fat
insmod ext2
insmod setpci
# Timeout for menu
set timeout=3
# Set default boot entry as Entry 0
set default=0
menuentry "Arch Linux - with bios dump" {
#search --set -f /boot/vmlinuz26
#setpci -d 10de:0d85 90.b=40
set root=(hd1,gpt2)
loadbios /boot/vbios.bin /boot/int10.bin
linux /boot/vmlinuz26-ck root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=ext4 video=efifb agp=off
initrd /boot/kernel26-ck.img
menuentry "Arch Linux - Linux (with bios dump and fix video)" {
#search --set -f /boot/vmlinuz26
#setpci -d 10de:0d85 90.b=40
set root=(hd1,gpt2)
fix_video
loadbios /boot/vbios.bin /boot/int10.bin
linux /boot/vmlinuz26-ck root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=ext4 video=efifb agp=off
initrd /boot/kernel26-ck.img
menuentry "Arch Linux" {
#search --set -f /boot/vmlinuz26
#setpci -d 10de:0d85 90.b=40
set root=(hd1,gpt2)
fakebios
linux /boot/vmlinuz26-ck root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=ext4 video=efifb agp=off
initrd /boot/kernel26-ck.img
menuentry "Arch Linux test" {
#setpci -d 10de:0d85 90.b=40
set root=(hd1,gpt2)
linux /boot/vmlinuz26-ck root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=ext4 video=efifb agp=off
initrd /boot/kernel26-ck.img
menuentry "Arch Linux test2" {
#setpci -d 10de:0d85 90.b=40
set root=(hd1,2)
linux /boot/vmlinuz26-ck root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=ext4 video=efifb
initrd /boot/kernel26-ck.img
menuentry "Arch Linux test uuid" {
#setpci -d 10de:0d85 90.b=40
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid d76f36b4-109a-48cd-81de-941f169b2213 --set root
linux /boot/vmlinuz26-ck root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/d76f36b4-109a-48cd-81de-941f169b2213 ro rootfstype=ext4 video=efifb
initrd /boot/kernel26-ck.img
Last edited by rwd (2010-11-27 20:35:01)