Ubuntu on Mac Mini questions: manually booting without grub, and preserving GPT partition

[nilesrogoff at gmail.com]

This is by no means my expertise, but booting from a live cd would allow you to make a new partition table and install ubuntu without dual booting. Beyond that I really don't know a lot, you could try setting the drive to mbr, mounting /dev, chroot and grub-install, but I don't know that the efi will boot mbr. mbr depends on the first 512 bytes of the drive being loaded directly into the processor and executed, and I have no idea how EFI works

> On Aug 26, 2014, at 16:23, Jason Heeris <jason.heeris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 27 August 2014 00:19, <nilesrogoff at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The insaller will retain the gpt
> 
> Good to know, thanks.
>  
>> and you will be unable to boot into ubuntu.
> 
> I realise I won't be able to boot until grub is installed, but since I'll be installing it in a later step, do you know if it's possible to do a "one off" boot into the new system, from the installer?
>  
>> I solved this easily with rEFInd. sorry I can't link you I am on mobile.
> 
> I am aware of rEFInd, but I want to avoid it for two reasons:
> 
> 1. I'm trying to show that it's not necessary (as per Mike Homney's post), and
> 2. It seems to be impossible to install rEFInd and *not* dual-boot with OS X[1].
> 
> Cheers,
> Jason
> 
> [1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2013-August/271071.html 
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