Re: Install Debian 10 amd64 onto USB flash drive with and for Macintosh
On 9/2/21 5:37 PM, David Wright wrote:
On Wed 01 Sep 2021 at 16:00:13 (-0700), David Christensen wrote:
[three long posts]
That was very useful. I've condensed it into a file (attached) for
my own use. The footnotes are notes, guesses and queries.
I tried to file a bug report against the debian-installer complaining
about the "Install" option not allowing me to choose where to put GRUB,
thereby breaking macOS; but I don't see it yet on bugs.debian.org.
STFW there are some resources for installing Debian onto a Macintosh
internal SSD, but nothing recent for installing Debian onto a Macintosh
external drive -- USB, SD card, or Thunderbolt.
My main question is — there are three identical listings taken at
different times; all say:
# mount | grep '.dev.sd'
/dev/sdb3 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/sdb1 on /boot/efi type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0077,dmask=0077,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro)
and yet two are labelled as wrong, and the third as correct.
Thank you for your sharp eyes.
Without repeating those many hours of unpleasant work to confirm or deny
the console sessions and/or the intermediate conclusions, at this point
it does appear that I misread the output from the first two runs of the
following command in my post of 9/1/21 4:00 PM:
# mount | grep '.dev.sd'
As always, I will have to be careful when making decisions based upon a
single letter.
RTFM mount(8), it talks about feeding UUID's into mount as command-line
arguments; but I do not see a way to have mount output UUID's (?).
I found the device letters a bit confusing when you're running the
rescue system. AFAICT, sda is always the SSD. So I was perplexed
by "Rescue operations -> Execute shell in /dev/sda3" because
your SSD only appeared to have two partitions in the OP.
The Debian Installer sessions were manually transcribed, and could
easily contain typographical errors.
What seems to be missing from the account is any consideration of
the so-called NVRAM variables, about which I know nothing.
My Debian posts did not include my prior ordeals making a bootable macOS
installation USB flash drive, logging out of Apple services, erasing the
SSD, resetting NVRAM, installing macOS Big Sur, etc., per the following
Apple URL's and lots more STFW:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201065
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496
(I never did figure out how to do a Secure Erase of the SSD.)
I'm
still working through how hiding the EFI/debian tree makes the
option-less booting suddenly work, but then, I don't know how
closely the Option key corresponds to pressing F12 on, say, a
Dell PC, which is how you set the device boot order.
(I haven't touched a Mac since the last century when they were
in a little AiO box.)
The contents of the SSD ESP filesystem are not ideal and I still do not
understand how the MacBook Pro firmware finds and/or chooses between
boot loaders.
David
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