Macbook 8.1 rEFIt operating system not found / Initramfs trouble

[peterrus]

Hi,

I have been trying to boot backtrack on my macbook early 2011 for a while now.

I am trying this because I can't seem to boot a backtrack iso (which has the same problem). As a workaround I tried to use a usb drive loaded with backtrack using unetbootin. As the EFI bootloader does not allow booting from usb appearently I had to install rEFIt on my macbook's EFI partition. it seems rEFIT is quite outdated however.

I tried booting a ubuntu 11.10 usb stick and a backtrack 5r1 usb stick and both give me a 'Operating System Not Found' error. The sticks are however working fine on a regular (BIOS) PC.

As this didn't work I tried booting directly from the DVD

The problem is that when I boot the 5R1-GNOME dvd I get dropped to a (initramfs) prompt as the environment doesn't seem to be able to find the live filesystem.

When fiddling around a bit in this environment I find out that I have no /dev/sdb device node. Seems that is the reason why the live filesystem cant be found, as that is where the DVD drive should be.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance, and I don't seem to be the only one having this problem.

[teddat]

I too am having the exact same problem.

backtrack 5 r1 livecd on a late 2011 macbook pro 13.

boots but can not find live filesystem

[peterrus]

I have reverted to a single partition layout (which includes the hidden EFI and recovery partitions of course, as default on all macbooks. This does not make any difference, also a bootcamp setup (without installing windows after creating the bootcamp partition) does not make a difference.

rEFIt partition table syncing fails as well, I get a *Error not found returned from gptsync.efi*

as seen in this screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/0HKk2.jpg No GPT partition table is found, and no MBR either. I am running rEFIt 0.14 of a small HFS+ partition at the end of the usb-drive.

[teddat]

i tried another 2011 macbook pro with the livecd, it also produces the same error. Its not the CD because bt5r1 boots fine on my desktop PC and pc laptop.

on a recent lifehacker article, the author used a 6 year old macbook pro that worked. my guess is recent macbook pros can't boot bt5r1 via liveCD. i can't find any mention of bt5r1 working on recent apple's. someone please prove me wrong.