Installed Ubuntu on Intel Mac shows "no bootable devices"

[Mr.Ryszard]

I have installed the Ubuntu on Intel Mac. Now I am seeing 'no bootable devices' error or simply a blinking cursor. I cannot see any kind of options to choose OS. I hold the option key but still nothing showed up. It seems to me like an installer bug. It may be wiping partition’s info in the MBR. This is the important data in order to boot "legacy" operating systems.

[Aniela]

I hope that you are trying to boot using the rEFIt. If so, there here I have solution which you can give it a try. When the first time you boot, you will get the rEFIt menu. In that select to start the partition tool. This option will ask you to synch the partitions. Select YES. Now reboot the system and now you will notice the Linux icon in rEFIt. Now I hope that it will successfully boot into Ubuntu.

[Jezriah]

First of all make sure that you have properly installed the rEFIt. Now reboot the system. AT this time the rEFIt menu will show you a new partition and you can boot it. Next thing is it will show you a UNetbootin boot menu. Now from there you can easily boot with Ubuntu Live CD or the installer. Make sure that, if you are going to run the Ubuntu, add ‘nomodeset’ to the boot options. If you don’t add this, then you will look garbled screen and nothing. If you are going to boot Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10; then it is really really necessary. I am hoping that you will get a fix for this issue very soon.

[aSITA]

If your Mac contains more than one partition then you can boot only from the first four partitions. This is because the rEFIt uses the BIOS emulation for Linux. You must use the MBR partition table. If you are thinking about Sync GPT to MBR, you will not get any extended partition. Only the first four will be available to play around.

[Evoldo]

I got the black screen when I try to use the refit's partition tool to sync the mbr, And there was the same error in white text saying "no bottable device" error. After that I did the partitioning with Bootcamp. This time I didn’t go for gparted. Now the error is changed to "no operating system found.”

[Dayanidhi]

I assume that you are trying to install Ubuntu 11.04. There may be a problem or bug in the installer. So due to this you are not able to install the Ubuntu on the same disk where the installer is resided or try to run from. I cannot tell you the proper reason for that error but it seems to that partition is already in use (the installer partition). The solution is not starting the installer but the Live CD mode. After running these commands start the installer:

  $ sudo cp -r /cdrom /cdrom2
$ sudo umount -lfr /cdrom
$ sudo rmdir /cdrom
$ sudo mv /cdrom2 /cdrom

[Baako]

I urge you to use the boot camp in order to resize your OS X partition. Then boot into Ubuntu LiveCD, and remove the fat32 partition. Launch the installer to install on free space. After this you will see information about what you have done. You will notice a button in the corner of the window saying “advanced”. This will let you to install grub to the Ubuntu Root partition.

[Clarice]

I downloaded an ISO. Then I used the Mac's disk burning utility to burn the ISO file to the DVD. The problem is this newly created DVD did not work with Bootcamp Assistant. I have created another DVD using the same ISO file using Different disk burning utility. Now it worked with Bootcamp. The problem was one DVD didn't work which was in "Mac OS Extended" format, whereas other one was in "UDF" format.

[CGale]

You need to reboot/turn on/off the PC few times in order to get the USB to show up in the boot menu and resync the partition by the use of rEFIt. After doing this only, luckily you will be able to see the USB as a bootable device. For that you need to hold the alt or c key while rebooting the system. As far as I know that the both the bootloader and rEFIt will notice the USB stick as a Windows device. You may tell that it won’t be a problem but it is expected sometimes.