Dual boot OSX 10.9.1 & Kali linux on Macbook pro 7.1

[Crix75ita]

hi all, i tried more times install kali linux on macbook.
I followed more guides, but the best result, is the black screen with " No bottable device " message, after the selection in "refind" screen.
i partitioned, the hard drive, i resized the original Mac OS partition, and i added twoo partition for Linux kali and swap.
I installed the kali from DVD in the partition " /dev/sda1 " and i selected the same partition for installation of grub during the Kali installation's procedure.
I installed refind http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
When the mac startup, the screen of refind appare with three icons "MAC OSX, LINUX FROM HD, LINUX FROM RECOVERY HD " after i selected the LINUX FROM HD, the black screen with " no bottable device " appear.
I also tried tu make a Grub2 usb disk, and if i try to boot the mac from Grub2 usb disk, i can startup the Kali linux, just installed on /dev/sda1.
someone can help me to configure refind and grub on kali partition ?
I would use kali on my Mac instead to use two Pc

[roadrunnerTX]

I am going through all the posts prior to posting in the forums here... One thing that I notice is that there are a lot of people that want to get Kali up and running on their Mac but are unable to. And, there doesn't seem to be a lot of answers coming back to the numerous inquiries about how to get that done.

Has anyone ever contacted you about getting it to work?
Have you given up or did you find a solution?

I have a Macbook Pro 5.5 (mid 2009) and I have tried numerous ways to get Kali installed -- all to no avail. However, I am learning a great deal about the whole process and would like to create a guide to help all of us in the same situation.

From what I have been able to gather so far, the Mac does not have a BIOS at all. Instead, it goes straight to the efi partition to look for loaders.
rEFIT and rEFInd are supposedly able to grab the process and jump to installations other than OSX. I had tried so many different ways to dual boot (rEFIt, rEFInd, resizing partition, etc, that I finally gave up on a reboot and decided to use the whole disk for the install. I didn't care about OSX anymore and just wanted the dang thing to work. Well, all I discovered was that unless I could get a bootloader into the efi partition (which doesn't seem possible through normal installation methods) it wasn't going to work. I guess the other option might be to program my own loader for the efi -- yeah right!

So, as of today, I am trying a last ditch effort to find a solution. All I want is Kali --- stand alone --- working on my 5.5 MacBook Pro.

I tried so many things that I got lost in what I had tried and what I hadn't tried. So, using Genius Drive for Mac, I completely reinitialized the drive (which got back my efi partition as well as the Startup Disk chooser). Now, I have an GPT Disk with the 3.5k freespace at the beginning of the drive, and the efi partition. That's it. Drive Genius added a partition of hpfs+ for the 496+GB on the disk, but I blew away that partition and left it as freespace.

I have been successful at installing Ubuntu standalone - wifi, nvidia, etc all working great. I looked closely at the partitioning that Ubuntu did and it is quite different than what Kali is putting down with their "auto allocate" feature. So, I even tried keeping the first few partitions that Ubuntu created, designating them as usable for the Kali install at the same mount points and reformatted them with the same file system (ext3, ext4, swap, etc.) Still it was a no go.

During the installation of Kali, the warning, and question about it seeing GPT signatures, etc. wound up having me run through several installations, answering the questions different ways each time. Still a no-go.

So, as of right now, I am reading, researching and doing the forums around the net trying to find someone, or some little scrap of information that wiil give me what I need to put all of the puzzle pieces together and let me do an install that will work -- with or without workarounds.

Anyone with an older macbook pro that has managed to successfully install Kali as a stand alone OS on their machine would be a welcome voice.

[cyrano]

I have the same MB Pro, I think (A1278, 2.53 GHz C2D). I have installed Kali a couple of times without any real problem. I'm not using RefIt (I used to, though). I really can't see where you went wrong. I'm now running Kali on a Raspberry, tho...

However, don't use Drive Genius. It's anything but "genius" when it comes to formatting EXT3. And probably EXT4. Use either Disk utility, or it's CLI counterpart diskutil. You can only really trust CLI, as gui OSX programs usually don't know Linux data. Some exceptions: TextWrangler, MachoView, FSeventer, iBored.

I used just one EXT3 partition, nothing fancy, just 10 Gbytes...