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iMac: Booting Linux from external USB hard drive

S

smcerm

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 14, 2010
6
0
United States
Hello, everybody. I have an Intel iMac with with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 on separate partitions. Recently I have acquired an external USB hard drive. I formatted it with Ext4, and installed Linux Mint to it.

The installation went smoothly, but I can't seem to boot from the USB drive anymore. Holding down Option on start-up only gives me two choices: Mac OS X and Windows. The drive isn't recognized in either operating systems anymore: on Snow Leopard I get "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" and on Windows, it doesn't even show up in My Computer.

I would appreciate any help. Thanks!
 
rgwoehr said:
You have to install rEFIt to boot linux on a Mac
Click to expand...

Thanks for replying.

I went ahead and installed rEFIt to my computer. The boot menu shows options for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. However, I'm only able to boot into Mac from rEFIt. If I select Windows, the system just hangs at the Windows icon. If I choose Linux, I get an error message about not being able to boot Legacy Operating Systems from an external hard drive.
 
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