Macbook Pro still stuck on splash screen
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
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The clonezilla boot is locking up on our new MacBook pro. The Clonezilla menu appears, but a few seconds after making any choice off of it, the boot USB locks up (LED stops blinking). The boot is freezing at the Clonezilla splash screen (only text is at the bottom, the cursive 'attribution' text). I think it's the same problem as https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/discussion/Help/thread/499e8662d6/?limit=25#0345. I'm sure it's a hardware problem, compounded by the fact that the new Macbooks don't have function keys (they have "soft" function keys) that appear for grub, and CTRL keys don't work in grub, so editing grub2 parameters doesn't work.
I tried the 2.6.4.10 versions (including pae) and the 2.6.4.11 version, which result in the above described behavior. All the AMD versions cause a kernel panic. The Hardware is a Macbook Pro 15,4 with Intel Core i5 1.4 GHz (https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/).
I managed to find an external keyboard. Using F10 to boot from the grub edit menu worked. I changed the default 800x600 line from "vga=700" and "splash" to "vga=791" and "nosplash". The line already had "i915.blacklist=yes radeonhd.blacklist=yes nouveau.blacklist=yes vmwgfx.enable_fbdev=1". (I got those settings from https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/discussion/Clonezilla_live/thread/7adf1a14/?limit=25".
Anyway, that didn't work. I'm not sure why "vga=791" would be better than "vga=normal" from the "safe" video mode, anyway.
Are the Clonezilla kernel sources available? After more testing, the kernel is locking up on the MacBook pro early on (before any output, before loading the initrd image). The MacBooks do have SSDs but I don't see why that would cause the boot to lock up.
If the kernel sources are available, could I build them on Ubuntu, or would I need Debian in order to try it out? I built an Ubuntu Kernel but it wasn't suitable for a live boot.
OK, I'm blind! I found sources at https://sourceforge.net/projects/clonezilla/files/clonezilla_live_stable/2.6.4-10/source/ but I'm not sure how to build the kernel from them. I'll ask about this on another thread.
On a related note, I took the Ubuntu Kernel I built (including SSD support and lots of other stuff) and it did make it further down the boot process, though it had a kernel panic and locked up at that point.
With newer macs (with T2 chip) you may have to go into the startup security utility and allow a "no security" boot for Clonezilla, as discussed here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330