Properly booting a Mac

[mjg59]

This is mostly for my own reference, but since it might be useful to others:

By "Properly booting" I mean "Integrating into the boot system as well as Mac OS X does". The device should be visible from the boot picker menu and should be selectable as a startup disk. For this to happen the boot should be in HFS+ format and have the following files:

• /mach_kernel (can be empty)
• /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi (may be booted, if so should be a symlink to the actual bootloader)
• /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist which should look something like

  <xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
          <key>ProductBuildVersion</key>
          <string></string>
          <key>ProductName</key>
          <string>Linux</string>
          <key>ProductVersion</key>
          <string>Fedora 16</string>
  </dict>
  </plist>

That's enough to get it to appear in the startup disk boot pane. Getting it in the boot picker requires it to be blessed. You probably also want a .VolumeIcon.icns in / in order to get an appropriate icon.

Now all I need is an aesthetically appealing boot loader.

Comments

Re: Bootloader installation

[mjg59]

Our install media has an HFS+ driver.