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I've run into a brick wall trying to get 12.04.1 LTS running on my new MacBook Air 5,2 (2012 13" model). The problem I keep getting is GRUB failing to install; here's the output from virtual terminal 4:

Sep  9 02:02:57 grub-installer: info: Installing grub on '/dev/sda5'
Sep  9 02:02:58 grub-installer: info: grub-install supports --no-floppy
Sep  9 02:02:58 grub-installer: info: Running chroot /target grub-install  --no-floppy --force "/dev/sda5"
Sep  9 02:02:58 grub-installer: /usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: cannot find a device for /boot/grub (is /dev mounted?).
Sep  9 02:02:58 grub-installer: error: Running 'grub-install  --no-floppy --force "/dev/sda5"' failed.

I'm trying to dual-boot OS X and Ubuntu. I first resized the HFS+ partition in Disk Utility using OS X, then installed rEFIt, then dd'd the alternate-amd64+mac version of the disk image to a USB stick and booted off that. I'm also setting noapic before beginning the installation as recommended in this forum post.

At first, following the advice in that post, I tried the daily image from cdimage.ubuntu.com/precise/daily/current/ and was getting an error message almost identical to the above. Then, hoping the release version would be more stable, I dd'd "ubuntu-12.04.1-alternate-amd64+mac.iso" from cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/12.04/release/ to my USB stick instead. Same result.

/dev/sda5 is a 1.0 MB partition of type "Reserved BIOS boot area".

Googling the "cannot find a device for /boot/grub" error doesn't seem to turn up anything relevant to my situation.

Any ideas how I can solve this?

Scott F
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1 Answers1

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Did you follow the detailed instructions on Ubuntu's Apple Intel Installation documentation page?

According to that, you should be installing GRUB to Ubuntu's root partition (assuming the instructions are followed verbatim, that partition would be /dev/sda3, but your mileage may vary).

Peachy
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YellowApple
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  • Oops, sorry I didn't notice this until now. I actually worked around this by installing Ubuntu 12.10 beta instead, which worked almost perfectly from the regular installer. Pretty sure I did what your link says, but it's now moot for me personally. – Scott F Oct 04 '12 at 04:52