MacBook Pro Dual Boot Walkthough

[stephanieswitzer]

I have a Mid 2012 MacBook Pro, with a 250Gb HDD, running macOS Catalina, 8Gb Ram. I wanted to replace the HDD running macOS Catalina, with a 250Gb SSD.

I backed up the HDD to the new SSD using Carbon-Copy-Cloner
I removed the HDD and installed the SSD and re-booted back into macOS Catalina.
I then followed the procedure found here:

https://medium.com/@genebean/dual-booti ... bc21b830ef

The only part that I didn't follow was the section on "rEFInd Installation" I found it easier to:

Using the "Option" key, I re-booted into macOS.
Opened the Terminal.
Opened the file manager and navigated to the rEFIind-install app and dragged the app into the Terminal and hit "Enter" You'll need to enter your Password, but the install took seconds to complete.

I then re-booted, and voila, the rEFind boot menu appeared, with the option to boot macOS or Mint. Worked great. Now to look at Theming:

https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/themes.html

[deck_luck]

Where you impressed with the difference the SSD made? I upgraded a 2012 MBP Pro from a miserable 4200rpm HDD(it was unbearably slow) to a new SSD. The user experiences was like getting a new laptop. Woohoo!

[Pulegium]

I do enjoy accounts like this , I have done a number of dual boot installations on Macs but each model has it's own quirks so it's always good to read other peoples trouble shooting techniques .
I'm currently fixing up a 2008 MacBook 4,1 A1181 for a friend .
In this case I am installing to two drives .
I have removed the broken optical drive and in it's place will install the original HDD ( with Snow Leopard still installed ) in a adaptor caddy .
In the main drive bay I will install a 500 GB SSD with Mint 19.3 .
I have given Mint it's own EFI boot partition along with root home and swap partitions .
My primary concern is where to install rEFInd ?
My inclination is to install it on the SSD for speedy boot up times but suspect it is better to install it to the OSX drive for system and firmware stability .
I was dismayed to find that although the main HD connector is SATA , the Optical drive connection to the motherboard is actually IDE / PATA on this device so the HDD will now be that much slower .
What do you think Stephanie ?

[stephanieswitzer]

Where you impressed with the difference the SSD made? I upgraded a 2012 MBP Pro from a miserable 4200rpm HDD(it was unbearable slow) to a new SSD. The user experiences was like getting a new laptop. Woohoo!

The speed difference is amazing. 12 seconds from boot to desktop, if I don't screw up the password

[stephanieswitzer]

I do enjoy accounts like this , I have done a number of dual boot installations on Macs but each model has it's own quirks so it's always good to read other peoples trouble shooting techniques .
I'm currently fixing up a 2008 MacBook 4,1 A1181 for a friend .
In this case I am installing to two drives .
I have removed the broken optical drive and in it's place will install the original HDD ( with Snow Leopard still installed ) in a adaptor caddy .
In the main drive bay I will install a 500 GB SSD with Mint 19.3 .
I have given Mint it's own EFI boot partition along with root home and swap partitions .
My primary concern is where to install rEFInd ?
My inclination is to install it on the SSD for speedy boot up times but suspect it is better to install it to the OSX drive for system and firmware stability .
I was dismayed to find that although the main HD connector is SATA , the Optical drive connection to the motherboard is actually IDE / PATA on this device so the HDD will now be that much slower .
What do you think Stephanie ?

rEFind does warn that installing it where it can be corrupted with any modifications to Mint OS Grub is not the best route to go. I've always installed it on the OSX drive/partition. BUT I've never tried it with 2 separate drives, only separate partitions on the same drive. Given that you have a 500Gb SSD, why not reduce the Mint partition to 250gb and create a second 250Gb partition for OSX that way both systems will be faster, and you could use the HDD in the DVD drive bay for backups. Just a thought.

[Pulegium]

Aaaand.. that is exactly what I ended up doing of course . As it really is the optimal way and having 2 EFI partitions was causing problems .
I started over , wiped my first Mint install on the SSD . I made a 200 GB partition for OSX and cloned the original HDD to it .
Then I did a simple "install Mint alongside OSX" on the remaining 300 GB instead of the previous root , boot , swap , home .
I installed rEFInd on the shared mac EFI partition .
I then put the old HDD ( still with it's original Snow Leopard install ) in the optical drive adaptor caddy . I left it like that so my friend could check to make sure that the clone was complete , after which he could wipe it and use it for storage or back up .
I had also upped his RAM from 1 to 4 GB , blew out all the dust and changed the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU .
Job done - friend very happy .

As an aside , I tested the SSD with Mint on the PATA connector and the speed handicap was dramatic . When I connected the HDD with Snow Leopard to the PATA the speed difference was much less than I expected .

Thanks for your advice Stephanie .

[unknown human]

Thank you for the walkthrough. It's been helpful to me in my search for ideas about dual booting macOS with Mint.

I was wondering if you (or anyone) had any thoughts about, and/or experience with, installing rEFInd to its own HFS+ volume. There's disadvantages with doing so but an advantage* in that that volume would show up in macOS's Startup Disk.

https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html#moving

*Boot coup recovery:
https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/bootcoup.html#osx

[fabien85]

I was wondering if you (or anyone) had any thoughts about, and/or experience with, installing rEFInd to its own HFS+ volume.

I have not yet seen anyone mentioning this on this forum, you will likely be on your own.
A few people on the net have done it, I put the refs below. It seems you have to create a very specific file structure on the hfs+ partition, put a fake mach_kernel, and "bless" the bootloader (I would suggest to do it from macOS itself, adapting the command that Rod Smith gives, instead of using hfs-bless from linux as the refs below do). Good luck !
Tell us how it went...

References
https://glandium.org/blog/?p=2830
https://heeris.id.au/2014/ubuntu-plus-m ... -efi-boot/ (final steps "Installing GRUB" and after, taking care that they already mounted the hfs+ partition on /boot/efi)

Edit: I just had a try, and for refind, this is in fact much simpler than I wrote. Just boot macOS, create a small hfs+ partition with Disk Utility, then point refind to install to it with the --ownhfs option, and it will take care of everything : creating the right file structure, fake mach_kernel etc.

Code: Select all

./refind-install --ownhfs /dev/diskXsY

where diskXsY is the device file corresponding to the hfs partition you created, in the Unix/BSD convention followed by macOS. On a macOS <=10.12 install (with hfs, I have no experience with later versions using APFS) with one hard drive, the drive is disk0, normally the EFI partition is disk0s1, then the macOS partition is disk0s2 (or disk0s3 if you have a recovery partition in disk0s2), so your new partition would be disk0s3 (or disk0s4 with a recovery partition). You can find this structure with diskutil list. Then everything works out of the box. A small tip is to give the name "refind" to that small hfs partition, so that you can identify it easily in the Apple boot manager.

[Minux1]

Where you impressed with the difference the SSD made? I upgraded a 2012 MBP Pro from a miserable 4200rpm HDD(it was unbearably slow) to a new SSD. The user experiences was like getting a new laptop. Woohoo!

Likewise.

Got a good deal on a mid 2012 MBP from Ebay with a 500 GB HDD and 4 GB RAM and Mac O/S High Sierra installed.
Beefed up the RAM to 8 GB, cloned the HDD image to a 1 TB Crucial SSD and upgraded to Mac O/S Catalina.
The difference between night and day.

I've got several middle aged Lenovo Thinkpads to install Linux on so I didn't bother dual booting the MBP.

[unknown human]

I have not yet seen anyone mentioning this on this forum, you will likely be on your own.
A few people on the net have done it, I put the refs below. It seems you have to create a very specific file structure on the hfs+ partition, put a fake mach_kernel, and "bless" the bootloader (I would suggest to do it from macOS itself, adapting the command that Rod Smith gives, instead of using hfs-bless from linux as the refs below do). Good luck !
Tell us how it went...

References
https://glandium.org/blog/?p=2830
https://heeris.id.au/2014/ubuntu-plus-m ... -efi-boot/ (final steps "Installing GRUB" and after, taking care that they already mounted the hfs+ partition on /boot/efi)

Thank you for the reply and references.

Here's another (actually, a quad boot with external drive) which does do it from macOS:
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questio ... ot-manager

[Minux1]

Used the new & secure APFS on my MBP rather than HFS and don't know how that would work on a multi boot system?