But when restarting the MacBook, holding down the option key, the USB doesn't show up. It only shows the hard drive. Mac mini software. You may need to reset P/NVRAM to let the bootable USB be recognized. After recovering the.iso file to usb it booted right up and now my MacBook air isint bricked anymore. (also the.iso file recovers to usb much faster.
March 11, 2017
Preface
I never was a fan of laptops, I mean 2000s era laptops, the ones that werebulky, heavy and hard to upgrade. The last point was especially important to mebecause in the 2000s you had to upgrade your station, add more RAM, more HDD,and newer CPU. You followed Intel’s Tick-Tock schedule, chosen Tock ones, andgot a performance boost (according to benchmarks).
- Partition my USB key as MBR: the Windows 8 logo fish stays stuck forever. Partition my USB key as GPT: same problem. I didn’t try to boot Linux EFI from USB but I think it would be the same fail. I’m really wondering if the problem comes from the MacBook firmware.
- Plug in your bootable USB device and boot up your 2018 2019 Macbook Pro from USB, hold the Command (⌘) key and you’ll see the startup disk screen, select the USB and boot it up. Caveats, notes and disclaimers. You need an uefi bootable image. (we’re uncertain of.
- A macOS Catalina USB install drive is a great tool to have on hand to for quick and easy macOS 10.15 reinstalls. We show you how in this video tutorial.
But recently, all of a sudden I’ve realized that I have a 4-year-old machine withIntel i3 CPU and it’s fine. I don’t feel the need to upgrade. Partly it’sbecause I’m not using a Windows for a long time. On my Fedora, I mostly sit inthe terminal without desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, edit text in Vim andthat’s all I need. The heaviest thing on my machine - the browser - is workingfine too, I can play a 1080p youtube video, I can load bloatedsites.
The other part that saves me from the upgrade is that hardware itself is notimproving vertically, but rather horizontally. Simply switching to the newer CPUwill not make your computer life full of magic and unicorns - just compareHaswell and Kaby Lake CPUs. The onlything that increased in the clock rate and might gain you some performance isthe bus speed that was increased from 5 GT/s to 8 GT/s. All the other things areabout attaching more stuff on your CPU - more memory, more I/O devices. And thefunny thing is that 3-year-old Haswell from 2014 costs the same $310 as new andshiny Kaby Lake. I’m not saying that the progress in CPUs has stopped, there isa servers market, there are a gaming market and HPC market that needs and feelsall these developments. I’m saying that for consumer machines like desktopsthere is no need to upgrade often.
So there is a rare need to upgrade your machine now and recent laptops are nice,light and hold battery for at least 8 hours. So when I got an option to get alaptop at my job, I took it. The problem was that it was a Macbook Air.
And I’m a Linux guy, so I had to install Fedora on this stuff. I don’t careabout you guys whining “…but macOS is so much better and friendly and nice andblah-blah…“. No. It’s not. Well, it’s not for me. I have a simple andefficient setup that serves me extremely well, looks gorgeous for me and don’tinterfere with my work. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t try - I did, but workingin macOS without tiling WM, strange keyboard shortcuts (you can’t set Alt-Shiftto switch keyboard layout) and fake user-friendliness (I dare you to tell me howto show hidden files in Finder) make me dog slow.
So I’ve decided to install Fedora on Macbook Air and because it’s a little bittricky, I wrote this guide. In the end, we’ll have a laptop with:
- Dual boot macOS and Fedora
- Working multimedia keys
- Working brightness control including keyboard brightness
- Working laptop lid close/open
Preparations
Because we’ll leave macOS we have to prepare Macbook. Thanks to the UEFIadvancement in the Linux we don’t need rEFIt/rEFInd - modern distros areinstalled as a breeze. So the only thing we have to do is shrink macOS partitionand prepare USB stick.
Make partition for Linux
My Macbook has only 128 GBs of SSD and I’ve decided to leave macOS on it, so Ineed to partition the drive leaving some usable amount of space for macOS. Idon’t have any experience with macOS and thought that 40 GBs will be enough evenif I will use it.
To partition the drive I’ve used “Disk Utility”. Just press ‘+’ button and setthe desired size for the new partition. Leave ‘Format’ default (“Mac OS Extended(Journaled)“) because you’ll anyway format it with ext4. Then hit ‘Apply’ andthat’s it.
Here is mine, though it’s already after I’ve installed Fedora.
![Macbook Macbook](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ef/52/97/ef5297b3abd7bbfa7aec3e4a8e79b3d7.jpg)
Create USB stick
First of all, you can’t use Fedora netinst image, because there is no workingopen source driver for Broadcom WiFi card that is installed in Macbook Air. Sochoose a full image that doesn’t require an internet connection like MATE orGnome.
Now, you have to create USB stick with Fedora. There is a tool called “FedoraMedia Writer” that will make bootable stick on macOS but, unfortunately, I’vefailed to boot with it. It seems that after repartitioning on macOS itimmediately mounts the new partitions and touch it making it somehow unusablefor installation.
So I’ve created USB stick on Linux with simple
Now for the installation part.
Fedora Installation
Boot into USB stick
Insert USB into Macbook, hold “alt” key and press power button still holding“alt” key until you see boot choice menu with Fedora.
MOST IMPORTANT! Linux partitions and installation destination
After booting from USB you’ll see usual Anaconda installer. First and mostimportant we must configure installation destination.
Enter this menu, choose “ATA APPLE SSD” and then choose “I will configurepartitioning” and click “Done” in the top of the window.
Expand “Unknown” widget, find your 80 GBs or 74 GiBs partition of type “hfs+”and delete it. Now you’ll see 74 GiBs of available space in the pink rectangleat the bottom.
Now choose “Standart Partition” scheme from the dropdown menu in “New Fedora 25Installation” widget, and then click on the link “Click here to create themautomatically”.
It will create separate / and /home partitions and also a whooping 8 GBs swap.You can tweak automatically created scheme at your taste, just don’t touch“/boot/efi” partition or otherwise it won’t boot. I’ve changed swap size to 2GBs, removed /home and / partition and manually add / partition to span allavailable space of almost 80 GBs.
Also, I setup LUKS encryption for my partitions, because it’s a laptop afterall, if I lose it you won’t be able to steal my stuff by directly connecting theSSD drive. Also, LUKS encryption doesn’t make any performance penalty.
Then hit “Done” and confirm your disk layout.
Configure installation
Now when you have partitioning configured, just setup your installation withAnaconda.
To make hardware work nicely like brightness control and lid close/open installsome DE like MATE in my case. DEs have decent udev rules and configs forhardware. It also setup display manager (the one that asks for the login andpassword) and X server. It’s amazing how everything works out of the box.Something like 5 years ago it was a pain to make mic and brightness work and nowyou just don’t worry. Kudos to distro and DE guys!
You can stick with MATE but I’ll install and configure i3 window manager overMATE.
Wait until installation is done
and then reboot into your fresh Fedora by holding “alt” key.
Install WiFi drivers
Macbook Air has crappy proprietary Broadcom WiFi chips. To make it work you’llneed an alternative network. You can use USB to Ethernet cable, or, as in mycase, you can use your Android phone as a modem. No seriously, just attach yourAndroid phone, select Modem mode and you’ll immediately see the networkconnected.
Now, when you have a network, to install Broadcom WiFi drivers open rootterminal and do the following:
After that, you’ll have WiFi working.
Macbook Air Usb Boot Key
Making things nice (for me)
Now it’s time for tweaking. My favorite!
Enable fnlock
By default, function keys are working as multimedia keys. To revert it back tothe functions we have to enable so-called fn lock.
Create file
/etc/modprobe.d/hid_apple.conf
as root and add the following toit:Don’t try to remove hid_apple kernel module - your keyboard stop working. Justreboot.
Infinality patches
Infinality is a set of patches for fontconfig that makes fonts looking gorgeous.I dare you to try it - after it, anything else will look like a crap includingmacOS fonts:
Getting my configs
Apple latest ios software update. Because Linux software is awesome and has text configs, I store most of them inDropbox and put known and loved configuration by simple copying or symlinking.
Install headless Dropbox:
And put dropbox CLI client to your ~/bin folder:
![Macbook pro boot from usb Macbook pro boot from usb](https://dinwa1391.njawxs.com/i/w?u=/images/C/7/C3187/C3187-1-dbd3-3TNI.jpg)
Now launch it with
dropbox start
.Installing i3 for MATE
Ok, so before that I was using MATE and while it’s nice I prefer tiling WM,namely i3. I install it with dnf:
and then copy or symlink ~/.i3 directory with the configuration in my Dropbox. Butwhat is really awesome is that we can use i3wm instead of MATE’s window manager- Marco. This way we’ll have all the niceties of DE like working multimediabuttons and brightness control while using our slick and nice tiling WM.
To change MATE’s window manager just issue these 2 commands under your user (noneed for sudo):
Logout and login and you’ll have it!
To exit from i3 as a window manager for MATE, use this in your i3 config
Settings
Everything else I configure with
mate-control-center
.Conclusion
So the hardest part in installing Fedora on Macbook Air is partitioning and WiFidriver. Everything else just works!
After using this setup for a couple of months I can say that it’s great. Thereare things that I wish could be better, but it’s mostly about hardware. Likescreen is crappy 1440x900 and keyboard is way too limited (no separate home/end,have to use fn+left/right). I would rather use some lightweight Thinkpad. Butanyway, the freedom to move your workspace with you is amazing, so I think I’llnever buy a desktop machine anymore.
Dec 21, 2020 • Filed to: Solve Mac Problems • Proven solutions
Recovery Mode in OS X provides a set of solutions for users to utilize when users need to repair and reinstall their operating system in an emergency. You can also reset the Mac password using recovery mode if needed. There are several ways to boot Mac into recovery mode. If you find one method overwhelming, there are several other alternatives you can use. We will walk you through the different ways on how to boot Mac into recovery mode so that they will become undoubtedly useful in a rare emergency.
Part 1: How to Boot Mac in Internet Recovery Mode
Along with the introduction of a locally stored recovery volume, Apple introduced its Internet Recovery service that allows your operating system to download contents of the recovery hard disk partition from the company's service. This option is great to use when your local drive is completely corrupted and you no longer can access locally-stored recovery tools.
Related: If you boot your Mac for lost data recovery, we suggest that you can try recovering files from dead Mac on your own.
To launch Internet Recovery, make sure your Mac is connected to a WiFi network and follow the steps below:
- Reboot your Mac.
- Hold the 'Options', 'Command', and 'R' buttons until the boot chimes are triggered.
- Wait until the system finished downloading the recovery tools from Apple's website.
It is noted that you are unable to boot Mac into Recovery Mode if you are using devices older than the ones below:
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011)
- MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2011)
- MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2011)
- iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011)
- iMac (27-inch, Mid 2011)
- MacBook (13-inch, Mid 2010)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2010)
- Mac mini (Mid 2010)
- MacBook Pro (15-inch and 17-inch, Mid 2010)
- iMac (21.5-inch and 27-inch, Mid 2010)
- MacBook Air (11-inch and 13-inch, Late 2010)
Part 2: How to Create a bootable drive into Recovery Mode
Adobe reader free download. software for windows 7. You can create a bootable drive to store an OS X Recovery Disk so that you can access recovery tools anytime, anywhere. It would be great if you could invest in a high-capacity USB 3.0 flash drive to store the required tools.
There are plenty of articles outlining how you can create a bootable OS X Recovery Disk, including ours. Once you have this established, you can follow these steps to get your Mac into Recovery Mode:
- Reboot your Mac.
- Hold down 'Option' on your keyboard once you hear the chime sound.
- Attach your bootable OS X Recovery Disk to your Mac and select it from the prompt list.
- Your Mac will launch into Recovery Mode and you can start fixing your Mac.
As you can see, there are plenty of methods you can use to boot Mac into Recovery Mode. There is no need to panic when you find yourself in trouble - just choose and master the method that seems least intimidating to you and you will be well on your way. After you boot Mac into Recovery Mode, you can also restore your data on Mac.
Related: read and know more complete details on how to create a bootable drive on Mac.
Part 3: How to Boot Mac with Installation Disk
If you are using an older Mac, it probably comes with a grey recovery DVD that you can use to run recovery routines. If you had bought a copy of a newer operating system, you can also use the installation disk to perform recovery.
It is the easiest way to go into Recovery Mode and here is how you can do it:
- Insert the grey DVD and reboot your Mac.
- Hold down 'C' on your keyboard until you hear the boot chimes.
The recovery tool will take some time to load. Follow the wizard that will put your Mac into Recovery Mode.
Part 4: How to Boot Mac into Recovery Mode with Local Recovery
- Reboot your Mac.
- Hold the 'Command' and 'R' buttons until the boot chimes are triggered.
- You will see the OS X utility window that will prompt you to choose one of the four options.
Macbook Air Usb Boot Keyword
Part 5: How to Boot Mac into Recovery Mode from Time Machine
It is really important to keep backups of your machine and Apple facilitates this with its Time Machine feature. It would be best to store your backup on an external drive so that you can initiate Recovery Mode using this when your hard drive is wiped out.
Follow these steps to boot Mac into Recovery Mode:
Macbook Pro Boot From Usb
- Reboot your Mac.
- Hold down the Option button when the startup chimes sound.
- Connect your Time Machine drive. It will take some time for the system to detect the drive. You might need to key in your password.
- Choose the drive to launch your Mac into Recovery Mode.
After all the above methods, you finally fail to boot your Mac into Recovery mode. Don't worry. We also provide further solutions for you - Fix 'Cannot boot into Recovery mode'. For those who need the data recovery solution, Recoverit would be a nice option. Free download and try it now.
Video Tutorial on How to Boot Mac into Recovery Mode
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