Boot failing: installing LMDE x64 (Betsey) on Imac (2016)

[petewt]

I am trying to get my new (purchased in 2016) iMac to boot Linux Mint Debian Edition 2. I have tried

1. Booting from usb/cd drives and creating a new partition table on the imac SSD hard drive
2. Installing OSX on a small partition (60GB), installing reFind and then installing LMDE on a second partition.

In both cases the following scenario occurs:

On booting from the install media, I am ONLY able to successfully boot into the LMDE installation desktop when I select 'Compatibility Mode' from the GRUB menu. Once the install media has loaded I then proceed to install LMDE on the desired partition with no errors. However, when attempting to boot into the new LMDE installation, installed in scenario 1 (above) am greeted with:

Code: Select all

loading initial ramdisk...

and interminable nothing.

Scenario 2 above boots to a GNU GRUB shell. When running the following commands:

Code: Select all

grub> linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.16.0-4-amd64
grub> boot

I am cautioned:

Code: Select all

error: no suitable video mode found
booting in blind mode

and there the process hangs.

I'm suspicious of my graphics card. Its an AMD Radeon R9 M390 with 2GB video memory.

I have tried adding

Code: Select all

nomodetest xforcevesa 

to grub script to no avail. In testing the nomodetest strategy I did not remove

Code: Select all

quiet splash

from the line and i did delete the trailing

Code: Select all

--

.

I'm at a standstill on this. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Thanks!

[erikapekop]

I don know it works for your problem.
I made a dual boot on an Imac end 2009.
A problem I have is that I don know how to let grub boot my osx, but I still can boot osx by pressing alt/option key -very long- when I boot/reboot or switching on my computer: in this way I reach the efi-screen

I used this tutorial which is written for a MacBook: https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/1643

The bootable usb-stick I made on my Mac with unetbootin app.

[erikapekop]

Maybe this can be useful too:

This is a piece of this tutorial: http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/2014/0 ... e-osx.html
thanks to Gary Newell


Fix the Grub boot menu
From within Linux Mint (not the live version, the installed version) open up the terminal window again (4th icon from left on the bottom panel).

Type the following:

sudo nano /etc/grub.d/40_custom

When the editor opens enter the following lines at the bottom:

menuentry "Exit to Mac OSX" { exit }

Press CTRL and O to save the file and then CTRL and X to exit the file.

Now run the following command:

sudo update-grub

Reboot your computer and you should now have a new menu option called "Exit to Mac OSX". If you want to use Mac OSX select this option.

[austin.texas]

I have tried adding

Code: Select all

nomodetest xforcevesa 

to grub script to no avail.

I hope you actually wrote nomodeset instead of "nomodetest".