Booting Fedora 21 in BIOS mode on Macbook 9,1

[witchbutter]

Long story short I tried to get FC21 running in UEFI mode but because of my macbook model it doesn't start because of some EFI bug.
Since I used to use refind to easily boot a bios style setup, I tried to do this with FC21 but it does not work for some reason. Refind automatically finds the kernels installed but it keeps trying to boot the kernel and the initrd seemingly without the rest of the options required for boot, such as where the root filesystem is. I think this is because even though it installed in bios mode, it is using Grub2, which for some reason isn't giving the needed info. Is there some way I can put the correct kernel parameters in refind.conf?

[Roderick W. Smith]

In terms of EFI-mode booting, try this:

1. Start the computer and get to the rEFInd menu.
2. Use the arrow keys to select a Fedora kernel.
3. Hit F2 or Insert twice. This should open a line editor in which you can edit your kernel boot options.
4. Add ro root={whatever} to these options, where {whatever} is the device that holds the root filesystem. With a default Fedora setup, this is likely to be an LVM, like /dev/mapper/fedora_root. (I don't recall what Fedora names it by default, though. If you don't know the value, you may have to figure it out by using an emergency disk.)
5. If this boots, run the mkrlconf.sh script that comes with rEFInd. This will create a /boot/refind_linux.conf file that holds your boot options, obviating the need to use F2/Insert to enter them manually in the future.

This might get you up and running -- but if you've had problems booting in EFI mode via GRUB, there's a good chance that rEFInd won't do much better.

If you need to boot in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode, you can do so, but you'll need to install a suitable BIOS-mode boot loader -- GRUB, LILO, syslinux, or whatever. You'll also need a hybrid MBR, which is ugly and dangerous. Depending on how it's set up, you may need to put your Linux partition in the hybrid MBR.