osx - Retina MBP won't recognize Archboot flash drive

08
2014-07
  • at least three characters

    I'm trying to install Arch on a flash drive. To do so, I'm trying to first get a bootable, "live" version of Arch on the flash drive I'm going to install it on later.

    I've followed the instructions here to the letter, but for some reason, the Mac's bootloader doesn't recognize the flash drive at all, and it's not showing up on my desktop as an external storage device.

    It does, however, show up in Disk Utility, and when I run diskutil list in the terminal. Attempts to mountDisk are failing repeatedly, both from the terminal and GUI disk utilities.

    To clarify: I'm able to mount the disk (as in, /dev/disk2, but not the logical volume, i.e. disk2s2, which contains Archboot).

    This, in turn, prevents the bootloader from detecting the flash drive as a bootable volume.

    I have already asked this question on Ask Different, but it doesn't seem likely that I'll get much help with it there.

    Has anyone else here had this issue? How did you fix it?

    • Answers
  • fredie mathews

    You say the bootloader didn't recognize the flash drive, so I'm going to assume you shut off the laptop and turned it on while pressing the "option" key, right?

    The flash drive not mounting is pretty normal, its happened to all of the bootable usbs I've made with the dd command. It does not have to be mountable in order for it to work.

    You might want to try using use unetbootin to create a bootable drive. The website says it supports Arch Linux 2010.05, but you can just use any disk image.

    Lastly, if you get the usb to work, I hope you know that you will need an alternate boot menu to boot into arch, such as rEFIt.


    • Related Question

    windows - Partitioning a bootable Flash drive
  • mmc

    Is it possible to have a 2 partition Flash drive that looks like the following:

    • A partition that is bootable to OS X (this will require a GUID partition table)
    • A second partition formatted either FAT32 or NTFS that is readable on both OS X and various flavors of Windows

    I have set up a disk using Disk Utility on the Mac, and it boots fine with a second FAT32 partition... but Windows does not see it. Any flavor of Windows wants to format the entire drive.

    Has anyone done this, and if so, can you explain the steps you followed?

    EDIT: Making it bootable is no problem. I have that. I'm wondering how to make the second partition on a Flash drive visible to Windows. It's possible that the "second partition" is the problem, and I need Windows to be first, and HFS to be second. I'll try that tonight.


    • Related Answers
  • Chris Nava

    Unfortunately, the windows accessable partition must be the first partition on a thumb drive or windows will not mount it. Linux installs can get around this limitation by putting the bootloader configuration files on the windows partition and everything else on the second partition. I'm not sure if you can do this with Mac though. My Mac is to old to try (as it is PPC based.)

  • mcandre

    The Geniuses at the Apple stores use external USB drives that boot to Mac OS X. So it's possible.

    iHackintosh shows you how. rEFIt helps to make drives bootable for Mac and Windows. You'll need something like it in order to keep the two partition managers (Mac and Windows/Linux) in sync.