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I have Mac OS X Lion installed on FileVault partition. On the same disk I've installed GNU/Linux. When I boot my MacBook I can only boot Lion.

How to boot Linux?

In case you need here is more details about my setup.

MacBook Pro 13" (8,1) - MC724LL/A (2.7 GHz)

Partition setup:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *160.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         139.5 GB   disk0s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:                 Linux Swap                         509.6 MB   disk0s4
   5:       Microsoft Basic Data                         18.5 GB    disk0s5
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS SSD                    *139.1 GB   disk1
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         999.9 GB   disk2s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk2s3
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS HDD                    *999.7 GB   disk3

Microsoft Basic Data is in fact Linux Ext4 root partition, no idea why on diskutil listing looks like that.

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Did you enable FileVault2 after the dual boot already worked or before? – gentmatt Jan 25 at 7:22
@gentmatt I really don't remember now. But I usually do encryption as the first thing on new laptop. Now I have retina and I was able to install Windows using Apple Bootcamp on encrypted SSD if you are asking about that. – Wojciech Bednarski Jan 25 at 17:17
Same for me. Having enabled FileVault2 already, installing Windows was no problem. However, the Ubuntu 12.04 live-image was not able to install and aborted with an error. (I partitioned with Bootcamp.) Therefore an disabled FileVault2 and installed Ubuntu. Then I wanted to reenable FileVault2 again, but it failed and demanded that I reformat the whole hard drive. So, I'm going to used Ubuntu in a VM only for now. – gentmatt Jan 26 at 8:45
@gentmatt I ended with similar setup. I have only OS X installed natively and for GNU/Linux and Windows I use Parallels. (for development Vagrant) – Wojciech Bednarski Jan 26 at 17:48

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote
  1. First solution: In order to boot a Linux-Partition, download and install rEFIt: http://refit.sourceforge.net/ You should sync the partition tables afterwards.
  2. Second solution: Hold ⌥ while booting. Then choose Macintosh HD or Windows (=Linux in your case)
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Doesn't work. Did you try it on disk with FileVault 2? – Wojciech Bednarski Dec 13 '11 at 23:48
up vote 0 down vote

According to a blog post, I got refit to work with my filevault 2 encrypted macbook:

  1. Download rEFIt ( version 0.14 at this time ) on the official rEFIt website
  2. Open the .dmg file, but don’t run the bundled installer
  3. In the following steps, we’re going to mount the hidden EFI partition, copy and activate rEFIt:
    $ sudo mkdir -p /efi
    $ sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk0s1 /efi
    $ cp -r /Volumes/rEFIt/efi/* /efi/EFI
    $ sudo bless --mount /efi --setBoot --file /efi/efi/refit/refit.efi --labelfile /efi/efi/refit/refit.vollabel

Note that the /efi/EFI folder already contains the Apple bootloader. If I where you, I wouldn’t remove it :-p

Note that rEFIt takes 25 second to show up.

That should allow you to select your linux boot partition

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