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I'm on a mac on dual boot, I've got my hard drive partitioned so that it can run OS X and Windows. Now I've got an external hard drive that I want to install Ubuntu 14.04 on it and use it on my mac.

I created a live usb and ran Ubuntu and I did everything needed to install Ubuntu on my external hard drive. One of my problems was that I did everything without internet access on Ubuntu, but I solved it now.

During the installation I got an error message saying that I couldn't install the bootloader on my external hard drive. So I continued the installation in order to manually install the bootloader.

So what should I do? Where should I install the bootloader in order to run Ubuntu from my external hard drive? Should I install it on my mac partition? I want my mac to boot even when I don't have access to my external hard drive.

captain
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2 Answers2

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With Macs, I think if you put the make the device bootable (e.g. treat it like the live USB) and hold the Option key while booting up, the mac EFI will recognize the bootable external HDD and give you the option to boot from it.

Mitch
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Booting an external USB on a Mac isn't that simple. You do want to install a bootloader to an EFI partition, but as far as I know it's not possible to get it to boot without using rEFInd.

I asked an answered a question about booting Ubuntu on external USB storage on a Mac here: How to boot Ubuntu on a mac from external USB storage? which you should see for detailed information, but in brief you need to:

  1. Create an EFI partition when installing Ubuntu
  2. Reboot to OS X and fiddle the boot sector
  3. Install rEFInd on the device
  4. Boot to rEFInd and then to the GRUB loader on the EFI partition.
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Coljac
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