Sunday, April 10, 2016

dual boot - Make bootable Win8 USB on and for Ubuntu MacBook

(Some time ago, I bought a new HDD for my MacBook 2,1. I put it in and installed Ubuntu on it, using a CD. Everything went fine, didn't have to setup any special Apple stuff, didn't need to bless my partition, make an EFI partition, etc. Everything was done for me.)



Recently, I found out that my DVD drive broke.
I want to install Windows 8 Consumer Preview onto my MacBook, next to the Ubuntu install, preferrably using GRUB to chainload the Windows 8 bootloader. However, since my DVD drive is broken, the only way for me to install it is to use a USB drive.




I tried making a bootable USB stick for my MacBook, but without luck. I can't seem to be able to get the Windows 8 setup on it.



I also tried installing it via a rawdisk image in VirtualBox (directly to a partition, so I'm also making sure my bootloader doesn't get overwritten, which Windows usually does), but I don't have enough RAM to do that I'm afraid.



So my question is: how do I make a bootable USB drive for my MacBook so I can install Windows 8? And when that works, how do I get my GRUB back? (if Windows overwrites it)



For people not familiar with how Apple computers boot operating systems: New Apple computers use EFI, a newer computer firmware to replace the old BIOS. This and some limitations (put in by Apple), some of which are explained here, make it difficult to make a bootable USB drive.



I have another computer with Windows 7 and Ubuntu.

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