[Solved] Chainloading Lion install from Grub2?

[ChillyPenguin]

I have Lion 10.7.2 installed nicely, following Tony's Unibeast USB method. It's installed on its own SSD, which I bought specially for the purpose. Once installed, I ran Multibeast so that it's able to boot without needing the USB again.

But I also have some previous installed OSs - Windoze 7 and various flavours of Linux. The latter on another SSD. I also have three (count 'em) mechanical hard drives installed (two left over from an old machine), and I've dedicated one of these to Time Machine backups.

My problem is that it's the Windoze/Linux SSD that's the default boot disk. That runs Grub2, through which I can access all my OSs except the OS X Lion. Sure enough, there are two entries for the latter (a 32-bit one and 64-bit one), which Grub2 has found. Neither of these works though. From what I've read, these both try to boot the Mach kernel directly, whereas what I really need is a Grub entry that chainloads the Chamelon (or is it Chimera?) boot up that Multibeast installed for my Lion install.

Can anybody point me in the right direction? I have searched and tried a couple of methods, such as Biafrog's at http://tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?t=38724&p=245668 but to no avail. Grub gives me either "no such partition" errors or some kind of "signature error".

At the moment, I can only boot to Lion by accessing my BIOS and changing the drive boot order every time. That's livable with but a bit of PITA!

 

[ChillyPenguin]

Managed to solve it after reading this post from Mega32:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=13567&p=264586#p264586

All I need to do was set the grub to chainload the drive number only, instead of the drive number plus a partition number, i.e.:

menuentry "Chainload Mac OS X Lion" {
set root=(hd3)
chainloader +1
}

See Mega32's post for more details.

 

[sos86]

Wow. Wasn't expecting it to be so easy, especially after fluffing about with other methods (in which you use GRUB2 to boot chameleon from a different installation method than that used by Unibeast i.e. you download the chameleon/chimera binary to your *nix installation).

Great! Now i can put the BIOS-startup-disc-switch method to bed once and for all.

 

[kaivai]

Thank you so so so much!!

I have spent the past 11 hours trying to figure this out myself, I have copied the boot files to linux, to osx's root partition and tried loading them from there, I tried chainloading, I tried using multiboot/boot, booting it through my linux filesystem, my windows filesystem, and I have at least 10 different trial menu entries commented out in my 40_custom file. You just made my month - finally, one bootloader for everything. Thank you!!

 

[Marcet]

All I need to do was set the grub to chainload the drive number only, instead of the drive number plus a partition number, i.e.:

menuentry "Chainload Mac OS X Lion" {
set root=(hd3)
chainloader +1
}

Thanks a lot. This changed my life ;-)

 

[odinb]

Thanks a bunch ChillyPenguin!

Been struggling for 2 days getting this to work!

Seting grub to chainload the drive number only, instead of the drive number plus a partition number fixed it for me as well!

i.e.
set root=(hd2)
chainloader +1

Now boot Linux/Ubuntu (sda1), Win7 (sdd1) and OS X Yosemite (sdc1) on the same machine from different disks!

Using 'Grub customiser' also made experimenting faster!

 

[vinnyamp]

Thanks a lot, ChillyPenguin!
I've been searching for a solution for hours until I found this thread.
Now my problem is solved, I can finally load Clover from Grub2.

For those who don't know how to edit the grub entries, check here: http://chris-reilly.org/blog/boot-grub-to-chimera/