Friday, May 17, 2019

Macbook Pro No Entry symbol

Getting a No Entry symbol when starting macOS on a Macbook Pro (7.1; mid 2010). The Macbook was initially configured to dual boot using OS X Boot Camp Assistant, but later used Refind boot manager to load multiple Linux installations.

Somewhere along the line, the Hybrid MBR had lost the Apple HFS+ file system (AF). Since an MBR can only have 4 primary partitions there is not enough locations to store more than the essential:
1 x Protective Partition (type EE)
1 x EFI System Partition (EF)
1 x Apple Partition (AF)
1 x Linux Partition (83)

Re-creating the hybrid MBR, using Linux utility gdisk (recovery menu), to include the Apple (AF) partition allowed macOS Sierra to boot again. Once corrected, the Recovery partition is bootable also but does not need to be included in the MBR.

A Hybrid MBR is required in order to get the BIOS Compatibility Module (CMS) to initialise hardware (video & wifi) so they work with Linux/Windows.

GRUB can be installed to the Linux partition to enable booting the other distros, although ongoing maintenance of Kernels may be an issue.

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