I have Mac installed on my internal hard drive. I have an external USB hard drive that I partitioned in to two parts. ~500GB for Fedora 14 (64bit) and 500MB for a boot loader, formated as fat32.

Having Mac as my main hard drive makes it hard to boot Linux from an external drive. What I need to do is instal GRUB to the 500MB partition to boot Fedora on the main 500GB partition .

So, when I boot in to the Fedora recovery shell from the dvd, How would I go about installing and chaining Grub? I have tried for about an hour trying to get it to work to no avail with this guide http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/gnu/gru...er/grub_3.html

fedora will not work on a fat32 partition
fat dose not support any file permissions fedora will give an error

format the drive to ext3 for /boot and ext4 for /

No, no, I did not install Fedora to a fat partition. I know that will not work.

I should have been more clear. My external hard drive has 2 partitions - one for fedora (ext4 ~500GB) and one to install another copy of grub (fat ~500MB). I installed Fedora to the ~500GB partition with its own boot loader (grub). That was easy. What I want to do is install another grub on the ~500MB fat partition so my mac will be able to recognize it and boot it. I want the grub on the 500MB fat partition to load the grub on the 500GB ext4 partition because macs apparently cannot boot linux partitions. Also note, Macs boot with EFI, not BIOS, which further complicates things.

Since my last post I have successfully installed grub to the 500MB fat partition with grub-install, but it still does not boot fedora. I'm thinking I did not chain it to the other copy of grub on the fedora partition.

I'm no expert on grub or booting and from the looks from googling around, getting mac to boot an external linux drive is not an easy task.

HOw do you try to boot linux on you're mac ?
Using refit ?
Or something esle ?

Yes, refit.

I also have refit installed on the 500MB fat partition. I have tried enabling and disabling a combination of the macs refit and the external drives refit. Refit will recognize the external hard drive as a linux drive, but never boots - it always defaults to my windows partition (on my internal harddrive)

I am getting closer (have not really worked on it), refit will try to boot grub, but then freeze.

I can boot the recovery shell from the dvd, chroot to the sysimage then start X11 to run Fedora, but that is a dangerous and roundabout way to run and boot the system.

Nothing? Anyone?