Trouble with dual boot install on old MacBook

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1

I’ve been trying various distros on my old MacBook air ( 2012, 4Gb, 500Gb, USB-3) and have decided I want to use Fedora KDE. I’ve been running Fedor-KDE-Live-x86_64-41-1.4 installed on a USB drive for a couple of weeks now and it’s great. But now I want to install it on my internal drive because the machine is not too portable with the dongle sticking out the side.

I followed the instructions on this wiki page and it created a btrfs volume, erasing a 200GB ext4 partition which had a (working) linux mint installation.

But it won’t boot. I see lots of error messages stream by so fast I can’t read any of them before it stops at a grub prompt. I have no idea what to do. FWIW here is a screenshot of the drive partitions.

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EDIT: To be clear, I didn’t follow ALL the instructions on the linked wiki page, since I already had an available partition for installation. Just step 5 seemed to be the important part. I didn’t use the recommended Fedora Media Write to create my live ISO stick either, because it wouldn’t run on my mac (this issue). I just used the same live ISO stick (created with Balena etcher) I had used before to install on my other USB stick.

2

I have Fedora on the internal disik, but prefer to use a USB-3 NVME SSD on this late 2012 iMac. The NMVE mass storage is much faster than the (still original) internal hard drive. You may be disappointed with performance on the internal hard drive.

My EFI partition is also 200MiB, but “Used” is only 26.23MiB. It is not mounted as Fedora is booted from the USB3 NVME drive, so to see what is in /sda1:

% doas mount /dev/sda1 /mnt     
base) [gnw3]~% ls -lR /mnt 
/mnt:
total 11
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 10289 Feb  1  2023 BOOTLOG
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root   512 Feb  1  2023 EFI

/mnt/EFI:
total 1
drwxr-xr-x. 4 root root 512 Feb  1  2023 APPLE

/mnt/EFI/APPLE:
total 1
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 512 May 13  2021 EXTENSIONS
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 512 May 13  2021 FIRMWARE

/mnt/EFI/APPLE/EXTENSIONS:
total 15361
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 15729264 Feb  1  2023 Firmware.scap

/mnt/EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE:
total 8321
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 8520304 Jul 21  2022 IM142.scap

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1       628M   21M  608M   4% /boot/efi

You should still have space for Fedora, but it is worth investigating why sda1 is so full. There may be logs in /dev/sda5. You should be able to mount the new Fedora btrfs partition and look in <mnt_point>/var/log/anaconda/. Fedora wiki How to debug installation problems

3

Thanks so much for the reply, George. Indeed, my internal drive (not stock, but still old) is slower than a modern USB-C SSD. But what I’ve been booting from while trying out Fedora is a USB stick, not an SSD. I just did some measurments with Blackmagic and was surprised at the difference:

Device Write Read
Crucial X8 1TB USB-C SSD (on Mojave) 410 417
Mojave internal 243 319
MOSDART 32GB USB stick 22 127

So I’m hoping my internal drive should be much better than the stick.

So at this point I tried a hack and got Fedora to boot, but the desktop is flickering badly sometimes, especially when I have firefox running, flares up when typing.

So I think you are right that the system EFI partition is too small (or too full). I had a hunch that might have been the problem, so I installed again with Custom partitioning, and added another EFI partition. That creates a minor problem that when I boot with the option key held down, there are two EFI disks to boot from. If I select the first, I get the same problem as before, but if I choose the second, it boots fine. I installed updates, but need to figure out the flickering problem.

I should probably find out, as you suggest, why my system EFI is full. It may have to do with the fact I installed a couple of distros on the internal drive before I came up with the idea of buying several USB sticks for doing the trials. And at one point I installed rEFInd. It disappeared not long after I installed it, something the documentation says is common so I just ignored it and continued using the “hold option key while booting” to select my boot volume. The documentation for removing rEFInd from a mac is a bit scary.

I don’t know if the flickering problem is related to my hack, but I suppose it’s possible. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that when I booted from the live ISO to do the second install, I started in “basic graphics mode.” I noted some flickering during the install, but I would have thought that would only affect the installation session, not the full install.

How do you think I can troubleshoot the EFI size issue?

thanks

4

OK, think I got it. The main EFI system partition had a bunch of cache files from a failed installation of rEFInd. Removed those, the refind directory and extra linux install directories.

Then did another install (without invoking basic graphics) with Custom partitioning. Removed the extra EFI partition and created a /boot/efi mount point on the original mac EFI partition.

All working fine now, with no graphics or other problems. Fingers crossed.

1 Like
5

I think a more likely explanation for the boot failure is that the Automatic Configuration I used for installation neglected to mark the system EFI partition with a /boot/efi mount point.

Although the partition was nearly full, fedora only uses 18 MB there, so I’m pretty sure there was enough room (In fact there was an 18 MB fedora directory before I did the cleanup.)