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

[Jason Heeris]

On 27 August 2014 09:58, <nilesrogoff at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>

Can we take a step back here for a second? I actually know what's required
for a pure EFI boot, and I've successfully done that before. What I'm
trying to figure out is simply how to boot into a new system *just the
first time* so I can set that up. For example, the installer seems to have
advanced options available, including editing the bootloader command line.
Would it be possible to use that to boot off /dev/sda2? If not, is there
some other way I can "cheat" just once, so I can get my EFI bootable
partition set up?

Overall, the thing I'm trying to achieve is figure out the *minimal* set of
instructions for a pure EFI boot, so I can produce a set of instructions,
or a script, or even contribute to the development of the installer and
grub. So, by minimal I mean: no rEFInd, no unnecessary installation steps,
etc. Do you think the -devel list be a better place for these kinds of
questions?

Cheers,
Jason
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