Fedora install fail - Mac Bootscreen reappear, cant start from disk, disc won't eject

[Remington]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to both this Forum and the whole Linux world. I wanted to install Fedora 16 on my Macbook Pro to get rid of my Lion OS and just to switch to Open Source. I do not have any programming experience and have never worked with the terminal, just to give you a hint on my experience.

I think I screwed something up.

Ok, here's my story:

- Complete formatting of my harddrive of my Macbook Pro 13" mid 2010
- Installed Windows 7 64 bit on a 70 GB NTFS partition, left another 160 something GB unpartitioned for Fedora 16. I did this as a preparation to install Fedora
- I ran Fedora 16 live disk and when I wanted to install it on my hardrive I got an Error message, that it could not find a suitable place for installing and it warned me that some data on the hard drive might get lost.
- The Fedora Installer just showed me the whole Harddrive, not any unpartitioned space to choose from.
- I decided that it is too risky since the program might overwrite the Windows partition as well. So I tried to create a ext4 partition from the free space, like a friend told me to do if the fedora installer does not find the free space by itself
- I started disk utility, clicked on the unpartitioned space, but the program just created a 172 kb partition instead of formatting the whole space
- I deleted this mini partition and decided to reboot.

Now everything went to hell:

- Instead of the automated Fedora Disk boot (still in the drive) there was suddenly the MacOS starter again (the same that always showed up after I encrypted my hard drive while using OSx Lion).
- It's clear that the starter won't find my startup volume since it is long gone along with the whole MacOS, but it now won't eject the Fedora Disc either. Windows 7 also does not boot, I just get the bloody mac boot screen.

Do you have any ideas how I can get out of this mess?

many thanks!

[Thetargos]

First, your Mac is very similar to mine... I'll summarize what I ended up doing:

1. Just as the chime sounds, press alt (option) key to bring up the Mac boot menu.
2. If this screen works, try booting the media on the drive with the EFI option. If it does not start try the "windows" one (which simply is a BIOS boot for the CD).
3. From what I gather, you are installing from a Live CD, in which case, you should be able to get to a Live session and from there you may be able to repartition your disk if you use gparted (you may have to install it, though).

I recommend you install from the DVD media, instead (I tried the live image in the past to be not so satisfying on my Mac), to force eject the drive, press the lower left corner of the trackpad while booting (as soon as you hear the chime).

Most Linux folks will tell you to choose a custom partitionning rather than the default partitionning scheme, which is rather confusing to manage in the traditional way. In order to do this, you may want to partition the free space on your drive in at least 4 additional partitions: 1 for boot (/boot), one for swap (recommended swap used to be twice the system's RAM, nowadays is just about the same amount or even half of it, especially with 4+ GiB system RAM), one for the root filesystem (/) and one for user data (/home); in order to avoid data loss across upgrades... Or at least that used to be reasoning behind this.

You CAN install without touching even once the command-line, alas, you may get more out of your installation experience if you get down and dirty

[Remington]

Thank you very much for your reply! I fortunately got it running. I was able to get the disc out of the drive and boot Fedora live. I experienced some trouble since Fedora did not like the partition tables created by MacOS X. That caused the error message I told you above. A friend (he's at Fedora since Fedora 1) helped me a lot. Actually I did youse the terminal a LOT for getting Fedora running I did not get all the details, but he told me that we basically copied 1024 zeros from one end of the hard drive to the other so Fedora would not recognize the old partition tables and could succesfully establish its own ones.

Since then it is running perfectly! We just had some minor futher issues (missing firmware for my Wifi, some missing libraries for the Skype beta etc.) but we were able to manage them all. I'm really happy now! The next thing is getting an Android - I fixed it sticker for my Macbook :-)

The olny thing I'm not fond off is that my mac only runs 2.5 hrs in battery mode, that's less than half than in Mac OS. Is there anything I can do to improve my power management?