GRUB hangs on Mac Install

[Eric Dunbar]

On 26/03/07, Eric Dunbar <eric.dunbar at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 26/03/07, Wade Smart <wade at wadesmart.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-03-26 at 11:30 -0700, NoOp wrote:
> > > On 03/26/2007 11:09 AM, Wade Smart wrote:
> > > > 03262007 1305 GMT-6 DST
> > > >
> > > > My client has a new iMac with intel core 2 duo with 1gb ram and 230gb
> > > > hd. After bragging about how great Ubuntu is he tried to install it on
> > > > his system. He gets most of the way through install but then when it
> > > > comes to booting it throws this message:
> > > > GRUB loading stage 1.5
> > > > GRUB loading, please wait...
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > and never gets beyond this. He said he left it for about three hours
> > > > thinking it would just get through whatever it was doing - but
> > > > apparently not. Any suggestions?
> > > >
> > > > wade
> > >
> > > What flavor of Ubuntu?
> > >
> > > Check here to see if any of the bugs match your problem.
> > > https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub/+bugs
> > >
> >  03262007 1343 GMT-6 DST
> >
> > He's using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS 64bit version.
> >
> > wade
>
> At the risk of jumping into a topic about which I know little...
>
> I suspect that 6.06 is his problem. 6.06 LTS was released very soon
> after the Intel Macs were unleashed onto the world. I would expect
> that for such new hardware he'd want to be using 6.10 _at the very
> least_, perhaps even trying some of the more stable 7.04 Live CDs!

Out of curiosity I entered: 'install ubuntu onto intel macs' (no
quotes) into Google and pulled up a very relevant page in the first
hit:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2022440

"Installing Ubuntu on any Intel Mac is problematic because Apple
Macintosh's use EFI BIOS. This isn't a problem for Linux normally
because it recognizes EFI BIOS, but is problematic because Ubuntu
wasn't designed with Mac's architecture in mind.

As a result, Ubuntu's normal Live CD install fails because it cannot
install Grub.

This isn't so bad, because there are several workarounds, but all the
techniques I found require some knowledge of Linux and are quite
technical."