Error installing Rocky 8.4 on macbook pro

damian · August 23, 2021, 10:18pm

I’ve faced the same issue while installing Rocky Linux in an iMac from 2008. The good news is that I have a working system!

Since I’m far from an expert, there may be steps that are not necessary or even incorrect, in any case here are the steps I followed. At the end I added some links to some sources I used to get this all to work:

Boot into the install media and set it all up as desired.
For the partitioning:
- Tell the tool to “Do not install boot loader”
- Select custom partitioning scheme:
  - Create /boot partition (1024 MiB, Standard, XFS), then edit it to make it /boot/efi (1024 MiB, Standard, EFI Partition). I did this because the installer wouldn’t let me choose the right settings from the + menu and I wanted to follow the steps from (1) in order.
  - Create /boot partition (1024 MiB, Standard, XFS)
  - Create /home, in my case (X GiB, LVM, XFS) group rl => rl-home
  - Create / in my case (X GiB, LVM, XFS) group rl => rl-root
  - Create /swap, in my ase (7.88 GiB, LVM, swap) group rl => rl-swap
- Proceed despite the warning/error regarding macefi or mactel tell it to continue despite it all.
Proceed with the installation.
Reboot.
Boot into the newly installed Rocky. It should take you to GRUB2, but fail to load automatically.
Boot manually:
- Identify the root partition, in my case: set root=(lvm/rl-root)
- Point to the linux image: linux (hd6,gpt4)/boot/vmlinuz-4.18... root=/dev/mapper/rl-root
  - Note. For this step and the following I don’t remember exactly the versions of vmlinuz and initrd, nor the exact path. I used ls, as in ls (hd6/gpt4)/ to determine in which partition and path where vmlinuz and initrd.
- Then: initrd (hd6,gpt4)/boot/initrd.img-4...
- Finally: boot
- This should boot your Rocky.
Once in the OS, update the GRUB configuration: grub2-mkgconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/rocky/grub.cfg
Hopefully, you are all set. Reboot to verify.

References: