Dual Boot Kali & Mac OS X (EFI and without refit/refind)

[jabroon]

Hello,

I have been using Kali as a live-usb for a couple of months now on Mac OS X. The other day I managed to get a refund on my almost 2 year old mac (that's a great story) and bought a brand spanking new one It's now time that I do a proper install. For the last couple of days I have been banging my head against the wall trying to get this to work. I have looked at this guide as well as numerous documents and forum posts around the internet. I did sorta manage to get it to work, albeit for 20 mins. It was dual booting perfectly until I tried to install the nvidia driver which sent the install nuts and somehow ended up in the first partition (which houses the .efi file) from being deleted.

I am also rather confused as a lot of the tutorials seem to be working on <1.0.8 which did not include EFI. Is there a simple way to achieve this that I have completely overlooked? Where does grub fit into the equation?

Could somebody please point me in the right direction?

Thanks

[staticn0de]

Hello,

I have been using Kali as a live-usb for a couple of months now on Mac OS X. The other day I managed to get a refund on my almost 2 year old mac (that's a great story) and bought a brand spanking new one It's now time that I do a proper install. For the last couple of days I have been banging my head against the wall trying to get this to work. I have looked at this guide as well as numerous documents and forum posts around the internet. I did sorta manage to get it to work, albeit for 20 mins. It was dual booting perfectly until I tried to install the nvidia driver which sent the install nuts and somehow ended up in the first partition (which houses the .efi file) from being deleted.

I am also rather confused as a lot of the tutorials seem to be working on <1.0.8 which did not include EFI. Is there a simple way to achieve this that I have completely overlooked? Where does grub fit into the equation?

Could somebody please point me in the right direction?

Thanks

Hi there,

I am not sure how you deleted your EFI partition while installing NVIDIA, that is a good effort

As for guides working with <1.0.8, EFI was still possible then, it was just not automatic. You still needed to have the internet connected to the efi packages could be downloaded. I'll talk through reinstalling grub on that first partition.

First, boot into a live mode EFI 1.0.8 usb drive.

From live mode, open terminal and run the following:

Assuming sda2 is your root partition (where you have / mounted)

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

Your first partition should be your EFI partiton

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi

Now, mount the important file systems

for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys; do mount -B $i /mnt$i; done

Confirm the EFI module is loaded

modprobe efivars

Chroot the file system

chroot /mnt

Now, the reinstall

apt-get install --reinstall grub-efi-amd64
update-grub

Now, unmount everything

for i in /sys /proc /dev/pts /dev; do umount /mnt$i; done
umount /mnt/boot/efi
umount /mnt
shutdown -r now

If you don't have the internet, you can manually download and install grub-efi from the deb files. Links for what you (should) need are below

http://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/linux/k...b7u2_amd64.deb
http://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/linux/k...b7u2_amd64.deb

[jabroon]

Hello Staticnode,

Thank you very much for your reply. I apologise for the time it has taken me to respond, I have been very busy with exams.

I have a couple of questions regarding your solution as well as EFI, Mac OS X and Kali in general.

Firstly, when I boot into the boot selector (holding the option key) I get the option to boot from "Windows" or "EFI". When I try the "EFI" partition the computer freezes, however the "Windows" option works great. I'm really not sure what is going on there, maybe EFI doesn't work but BIOS emulation is working and that is why the boot manager calls it "Windows".

Secondly, in your recommendations you say to mount /dev/sda1 and install grub there but from my understanding of how the Apple system works is that this folder contains the data for Apple's boot manager.

I failed to mention in my question that I had already wiped my other partition in an attempt to re-install Kali from scratch. I read numerous tutorials but I have failed to gain an overall understanding of how it all works and thus have failed to adequately adapt existing tutorials.

My current understanding is:
1. The computer is given the boot signal, the firmware detects that the option key is being pressed and provides the boot selector
2. The boot selector looks for HFS+ partitions with a blessed boot.efi file in System/Library/CoreServices/
3. In this case, the boot selector finds the boot.efi file on /dev/sda4 (/dev/sda1 is the "EFI" partition that is the apple boot selector/manager, /dev/sda2 is OS X, /dev/sda3 is the recovery partition, /dev/sda4 is the HFS+ parition that contains the /boot directory from Kali and /dev/sda5 is kali) and launches it
4. Boot.efi is created by grub-efi-amd64 and then boots Kali on /dev/sda5

As the OS X boot selector only looks for boot.efi on HFS+ partitions Kali must occupy two partitions, one for boot.efi and once this file is loaded it may then boot Kali on the EXT4 partition. What I don't understand at all is what to do during the install process. When installing Kali do I skip the installation of grub and then manually install grub-efi? The Kali documentation seems to be rather silent on the issue (I am assuming as EFI is only a relatively new feature).

Thank you very much for your help.

- Jack