Tri-booting Kali, Windows, OSX on a Mac

[Otis]

I have a Macbook Pro Retina and would like to book OSX (Mountain Lion), Windows 7, and Kali Linux using rEFIt.

I have successfully managed to install OSX and Windows.

I have tried give or take 10 times now in install Kali testing different methods and possibilities but I can not install GRUB on to a Kali Partition which is essentially what has to be done in order to access it through rEFIt.

Doing this with systems such as Ubuntu is fairly self explanatory as there is an "Advanced Options" feature during install which allows you to easily specify GRUB install location.

Kali is not quite as easy it starts to install grub then asks for a location (e.g. dev/sda1, dev/sda2, dev/sdc5,)
None of which it will accept it gives a "fatal error" and asks me to try again or edit some other aspect of the install.

Lilo (bootloader) is much the same as an alternative and I have had no success with this either.

I do not mind working harder on this I would just like to know whether it is possible.

I have done tasks similar to this before and have never as of yet actively had to ask for help so there is either something incredibly simple I am missing (which would be fantastic) or this may be more of a task than i initially predicted.

Any help would be much appreciated.
Please no negative comments part of computing is progress and while I realise this isn't a necessary endeavour or perhaps even a worth while one I would like to see if it is possible and if I am able to enjoy the benefits of an offensive security linux system while running on a mac .

[Vulpi]

See this thread: no replies so I'm assuming no-one has done it. http://forums.kali.org/showthread.ph...from-a-Macbook

This guy seems to be almost there - may be worth contacting him http://forums.kali.org/showthread.php?1216-Error-During-Login

[maverik35]

You need to read about UEFI..There is a partition for esp and another for GPT...The bootloader must be in the ESP partition, in that partition are contained all bootloaders, even the default loader.

GPT contains all partitions in HDD...ESP contains bootloaders, hardaware drivers, scripts (run during boot process)and utilities...

In MAC, there is a variant in how is managed..

Again, need to read.

[acib708]

Had the exact same problem, this fixed it:
When making the partitions in the Kali installation GUI, select your main partition, the one with / mount point, edit it and select the "Bootable" checkbox. Make a note of the partition identifier. E.g if the HDD is 'sdb' and the / mount point says #4 then your identifier will be /dev/sdb4, then when the installer asks where to put GRUB, give it the identifier, in this example /dev/sdb4, and voila. Let the installation finish, reboot and when in rEFIt, select partition manager, and it will ask if you want to sync the tables, say yes, reboot once more, and you're done.

[sam]

Ok, so I've made a USB bootable copy of Kali Linux and I can boot it an use it live. But, when I try to install it I run into issues. Firstly the touchpad doesn't work which is strange because it works live... Then I get this message.

"Detect network hardware

Some of your hardware needs non-free firmware files to operate. The firmware can be loaded from removable media, such as a USB stick or floppy.

The missing firmware files are: b43/ucode29_mimo.fw b43-open/ucode29_mimo.fw

If you have such media available now, insert it, and continue.
Load missing firmware from removable media?"

Unfortunately at this point Google or the Forums yield no results on where to obtain these firmware files... I assume they are proprietary on either Broadcom or Apples end???

[rshuck]

Skip it during install. Once you get to the desktop get broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2 from somewhere online. You'll need to decompress this file in OSX and put it on a USB drive (or somewhere accessible on your OSX Partition) and go back into Kali, then do the following:
cd to the directory with the decompressed broadcom folder and run
b43-fwcutter-w /lib/firmware wl_apsta.o
modprobe b43

That will get it working.

[Patmac]

After 1 day of being puzzled trying several posts here and all over google I found the solution that worked for me.
No rEfit or refindit (I like things simple, not reading through endless pages of text just to find nothing works).

This installation was done on a Macbook Pro 2008 2.4 Ghz santa rosa, 4 GB Ram and a 500GB Harddrive so nothing special but it should work on any intel mac that supports bootcamp (the end result is the same as if you would have ubuntu running).

1. First thing I did as this was a spare machine was wipe the whole harddrive and install a fresh copy of Mavericks (Os 10.9) on it.
2. After the whole welcome to OSX create a user account walk through I went straight to the bootcamp assistant in the utilities folder (I couldn't be bothered installing OS X updates as I wiped my machine already 3 times) in bootcamp I did nothing special just created a 100 GB partition for windows and restarted the mac.
3. Installed windows 7 64 bit ultimate, standard out of the box, so again nothing special so far.
4. Now comes the fun part... after installing OS X and windows I booted into OS X and went to disk utility clicked on the harddrive on the left (Not the volume) and resized the mac partition from 399 GB to 349 GB (I just changed the 9 into a 4 and pressed TAB) and pressed apply, so now you should have one bootcamp partition one Macintosh partition and 50 GB greyed out (Free) space.
5. restart the mac and put the kali disc into the dvd drive, and hold the alt/option key imidiatelly keep it pressed and the apple boot menu will pop up, select kali and choose install from the kali menu.
6. When the machine has started into the kali installer it will ask you how to partition your drive, in most posts I see manual this and that, ignore that and just do a install on most empty space which is the top option. install kali and when all that is finished it will ask you where grub should be installed VERY IMPORTANT! Leve this blank just hit return.
7. When the mac has rebooted, there will be no thace of kali, but your 50 GB is gone, at this point I started googling again, and decided to install rEFindit, and after a reboot still nothing. So i started reading the rEFindit documentation, and after 30 minutes of reading decided that I didn't want to become a EFI programer of deploy any systems, I just wanted kali to start, I even contemplated installing backtrack again as that worked.
8. So finally we are coming to the solution part! after reading all 7 steps above you should have a fully working but non bootable 50 GB partion with Kali.
Restart the machine with the Kali DVD in the drive, and hold the option/alt key pressed (Or if you got ReFindit installed choose the DVD) when in the kali boot meu choose the top option, kali live boot or sometheing.
9. This part I wrote down from a youtube clip (Reason youtube clips disappear for no reason sometimes) The original clip can be found here : *REMOVED*
here is the extract from youtube :
Go to application on the top of your screen, and choose System Tools -> Administration -> Gparted
Once this has started up look for the partition kali has been installed on it should be a ext4 partition. (Something like /dev/sda5 mine was /dev/sda6) Make a note of that.
Now open up a new terminal window at the top of the screen (Black square icon with a white > init) and type the following with a return after every line :
(IN THE FIRST LINE CHANGE THE NUMBER INTO THE NUMBER YOU WROTE DOWN! E.G /dev/sda6)
mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/sda
update-grub
exit
umount /mnt/dev/pts
umount /mnt/dev
umount /mnt/proc
umount /mnt/sys
umount /mnt

After this reboot your mac, and press alt/option when in the apple boot menu select windows, and it should boot into Grub where you can select Kali.

That's it, let me know if it works for you guys as well, hope it helps

[Kianbethfehu]

Restart the machine with the Kali DVD in the drive, and hold the option/alt key pressed (Or if you got ReFindit installed choose the DVD) when in the kali boot meu choose the top option, kali live boot or sometheing.
9. This part I wrote down from a youtube clip (Reason youtube clips disappear for no reason sometimes) The original clip can be found here : *REMOEVD*
here is the extract from youtube :
Go to application on the top of your screen, and choose System Tools -> Administration -> Gparted
Once this has started up look for the partition kali has been installed on it should be a ext4 partition. (Something like /dev/sda5 mine was /dev/sda6) Make a note of that.
Now open up a new terminal window at the top of the screen (Black square icon with a white > init) and type the following with a return after every line :
(IN THE FIRST LINE CHANGE THE NUMBER INTO THE NUMBER YOU WROTE DOWN! E.G /dev/sda6)
mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/sda
update-grub
exit
umount /mnt/dev/pts
umount /mnt/dev
umount /mnt/proc
umount /mnt/sys
umount /mnt

Jeah, finally it worked ... very much thanks to Patmac!!

I followed your steps two times without any success - then I made a guess and just tried to install some Ubuntu because that worked fine with my late 2011 MacBookPro and MacOs dual boot.

Right after installation finished, with an error about grub could not install to root (in my case /dev/sda8) I stayed in ubuntustudio live system and then started to reinstall grub-efi-amd64 manually according to your awesome guide. Before that I needed to install the correct package (grub-efi-amd64) with apt-get.

After this point I did exaxtly like you with one difference: I installed grub into /dev/sda8 instead of /dev/sda ...

With the correct Grub now installed I can boot from refind into grub, from there into windows/ubuntustudio/kali and it works fine!


Feels good to get something working at the end Thank you very much! Our World will be better if everybody shares like you do here ...