[SOLVED] Jessie install GRUB 2 Issue

[brazenp]

Hi All,

This is my first post and first time user of Debian, In the past I have used Gentoo and Arch but always encountered instability on both, therefore I thought I would give Debian a try as it is considered a 'stable' distro.

First of all my hardware:

Apple Macbook Pro 15" Retina
16GB Ram
512GB SSD
Integrated Intel card with Nvidia Geforce 750M discrete card
Broadcom 4360 Wireless

I have installed Jessie using the USB stick boot method, everything went fine, I was presented with the graphical installer which I worked my way through.

I have my partitions setup as follows, this is a UEFI system to it is a GPT table.

/dev/sda1 - Apple EFI Partition

/dev/sda2 - Mac OS X El Capitan

/dev/sda3 - Mac OS X Recovery

/dev/sda4 - FAT 32 /boot

/dev/sda5 - EXT4 /

/dev/sda6 - SWAP

/dev/sda7 - EXT4 /home

Now the issue, during the install it did not ask me where I would like to install GRUB2, therefore I can only assume it has installed it on /dev/sda1, now this would be fine except when my system boots and I am presented with GRUB2 there is not option to boot OS X.

As I understood it GRUB2 should detect other OS's as part of the configuration and install?

Ideally I would like to add an OS X entry to GRUB2, now please bear with me as I have not used GRUB2 in a long time, as I have been booting the kernel directly from the EFI hardware meaning no boot loader. From what I have read I should edit the grub.conf/30-os-probe file? and add something in there? If so I am not sure what I would need to add for boot my OS X partition.

So far this has been a great experience in term of installing, everything seems a lot smoother and stable especially Xorg and Gnome compared to previous distros. If anyone could help or point me in the right direction for a solution to this I would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

during the install it did not ask me where I would like to install GRUB2, therefore I can only assume it has installed it on /dev/sda1

*If* you have installed a UEFI system then things work a little differently -- the instruction to load GRUB is placed in the motherboard's NVRAM with the .efi loader binary being placed directly on the EFI system partition.

Check the NVRAM contents with:

Code: Select all

# efibootmgr -v

https://packages.debian.org/jessie/efibootmgr

However, if you used a live ISO image to install then you may actually be booting a non-UEFI system.

Is there a directory at /sys/firmware/efi?

If not, you are not booted in UEFI mode.

I don't think this will be the case as a BIOS boot partition is needed to hold the non-UEFI GRUB bootloader on a GPT disk and you do not appear to have such a partition.

Check with:

Code: Select all

# parted -l

I can't stand Macs and have no experience with them (thank $DEITY) so I can't really help you with that, sorry.

[kiyop]

Answer the questions given by Head_on_a_Stick and also boot the installed debian and execute the following and post the results

Code: Select all

fdisk -l
blkid
df
find /boot/efi -iname *.efi

[brazenp]

Guys,

This is definitely an UEFI installation, The UEFI directory is populated.

I have since installed Refind to /dev/sda1 and the machine now boots and i can either boot Debian or OS X.

Although this is not how I envisaged finding a solution it has worked for me.

Many Thanks