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Comment by DangitBobby | Hacker News Reader

What is the use case? Why boot from many distros?

In my case, I use a few different distros around the house, arch for my desktop/laptop, fedora for the htpc, popos for my wife's laptop, elementary for the kids.

Having a single boot drive to install / update / fix problems is handy.

I know running `cat distro.iso > /dev/sda` isn't hard but at least I don't need to tie up multiple 32gb flash drives with 700mb isos.

I think the main thing today is that I have very high capacity flash drives regardless, may as well make good use out of them.

I have a multi-boot MacBook Pro 2007 with Mac OS 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, Windows Tiny7, Windows XP, and Ubuntu.

It's been useful to boot into WinXP to play AoE or WoW, or Mac OS 10.9 to run p0sixspwn to jailbreak an iPhone 4S. The laptop has a 2 TB drive, and a lot of legacy software just in case I need to open some obscure file (e.g. AppleWorks).

I regularly find old laptops in the trash, and friends like it very much when I repair them and give them away. Some only boot Win10, others only Win7 (x64 or x32), and the oldest only XP. As for why you'd want various Linux distros, I imagine it's a similar platform-sensitivity issue.

I wish there were a bundle pack of USB drives with installers for all Windows and Mac OS versions, so I could just pick out the right installer and install. And another bundle of live USBs. Carrying around lots of USB sticks would be bulky, but somehow I expect it to be more reliable than Ventoy - my experience with the Zalman ZM-VE350 has never been reliable enough to replace an external CD drive.

I have a late 2007 MBP too (superdrive removed) and was never able to boot and install an OS straight from USB(tried refit and refind too) , be it clonezilla, Win 7 32/64Bit; only OS X works via USB. (Windows via superdrive worked flawlessly). Luckily I had an old winclone backup I could use, when I replaced the SSD last year.

Is the EFI in newer MBP still that picky?

Did you have success with this tool?

It sounds like you have one of the last of the early 64-bit Macs that had a 32-bit EFI. They were difficult beasts to get working with anything other than officially supported macOS versions. You can follow the guide linked below but basically you need to create a 32/64 hybrid EFI boot image. There were some Windows machines (mainly BayTrail and similar vintage tablets) that also had this issue and the solution is very similar.

https://ldx.ca/notes/intel-mac-efi32-linux.html

Thanks for the hint ("beast" descibes it perfectly :) ), seems mine is castrated: "Furthermore, it appears that although subsequently released MacBook, MacBook Air, and pre-"Mid-2010" Mac mini models all are equipped with "Core 2 Duo" 64-bit processors and 64-bit EFIs, Apple has blocked these "consumer-targeted" Macs from booting in 64-bit mode. iMac and MacBook Pro models released in 2007 with 64-bit EFIs seem to have been blocked as well."

Found @ https://everymac.com/mac-answers/snow-leopard-mac-os-x-faq/m...

Ouch, I had forgotten about those specific devices. I had a Mac Mini Core Duo that I had upgraded to a Core2 Duo and was never able to get Snow Leopard to boot into 64-bit mode. I was able to get Linux and even OpenBSD installed on it using the previously mentioned bootia32.efi method.

Also, you may be able to boot 64-bit macOS on your system if you follow the netkas.org link from your everymac.com link:

http://netkas.org/?p=189

Thanks, but no tampering with this system anymore until I have a replacement on the desk...

Remember: Never touch a working boot setup an old Mac with a crippled EFI. ;)

Instead of using multiple USB drives, each dedicated to one OS install image, a sysadmin only needs to have one large USB drive that olds all ISO images they need.

Some good answers already, but to answer directly; I like distro hopping to see what’s what. Plus Kali for pen testing occasionally.

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