Booting Linux/BSD/Solaris from Boot Camp Partition

M

markus1

Bit poster
I installed the Latest Parallels Desktop v11.1.1-32312 trial on an Retina MacBook Pro 2015 on OSX 10.11.2

As i Needed more than 4 Partitions for all my Support work, i had to Install without that bogus Hybrid EFI/MBR thing that the BootCamp assistant uses.
so i did all installations the native EFI way.

When i natively/physical Boot any OS (OSX, BSD, Win10, win8,1, kUbuntu 15.10, solaris) they just work.
Any of these put their Bootloader in the EFI Partition.

Now when i try to use these Partitions as the Target for native Booting in Parallels,
I can not select a Partition with a GPT typecode other than 0x0700 (Microsoft Basic data) to assign to a VM.

As soon as i change the Typecode of an e.g. Linux Partition from 0x8300 to 0x0700 it appears in the list of partitions to assign to a vm.

Is this intended behaviour?

Could it be changed to allow any Partition to be assigned to a VM?

Or how am i Supposed to tell Parallels to boot with a Physical partition of "another" Operating System, other than using Legacy MBR partitioning?

regards
 
Last edited:
markus1,

I'm having the same problem in Parallels 13. It used to just work in 10. I'm sure the APFS setup has something to do with it, but not tech savvy enough to know how/why... I've created a support ticket about the issue. We'll see what happens. In the meantime, how do you go about changing the Typecode?

Cheers
 
Anyone find a solution here? I just bought Parallels13 thinking I'd be able to use it to boot up an install I have on another HDD for Yosemite but can't find anywhere to select that disk to boot from :(
 
I've gotten a little closer to booting my physical Ubuntu partition thru Parallels 13 on my Mac, but haven't the expertise to finalize the solution. I've surmised the issue is with Parallels' generic BIOS versus the new Grub2 boot process, but I don't know how to nail down a work-around. Here's what I've tried so far...

I figured out how to change the typecode of my Linux/Ubuntu/ExtFS 4 partition. It's just a matter of booting into a live OS from which you can launch gparted, like Ubuntu itself or PartedMagic, then changing the partition's bootflag to "mcsftdata." The partition will then show up in the drop down menu when selecting boot partitions in Parallels.

I then tried creating an iso of the grub environment within the Ubuntu partition (natively), as described in step two of this lifehacker post (but with customizations for my setup), then used that iso as the first boot option (mounted CD) in Parallels, but that didn't work...I think because I'm not using the correct directories to create the iso... This tactic could be the solution if I can figure out the correct directories.

The thing is, during installation, Ubuntu now places a small, initial boot loader on the EFI partition, a loader that seems to redirect to /boot/grub/grub.cfg, which does most of the heavy lifting. I don't know that I can create an iso that will pull from both the EFI partition and the root directory this way. Back in the day (when booting a physical linux partition like it was the bootcamp partition actually worked), it seems all the necessary boot files were on the root linux partition, probably in /boot/grub. You just had to select that partition in Parallels and away you went.

So, I figured the iso image simply needs to act as EFI and redirect the boot process to /boot/grub/grub.cfg, which meant the iso just needed to be a basic Grub2 iso. I downloaded the supergrub2disk iso and used that as the initial bootloader (mounted CD). It takes a moment, but eventually scans my Ubuntu partition and finds all the kernels; however, none of them actually work. Some result in kernel panics; others show the Ubuntu splash screen, only to end in the "rescue mode" terminal. I imagine the grub.cfg file could be edited in some way to allow for both native and VM booting, but have no idea how to make said changes.

I also thought my fstab or video drivers might be causing the panics and "rescue mode' activation, but after digging into those files, didn't see any noticeable issue. Nothing but the root Ubuntu partition is listed in the fstab and I'm using the standard xorg video drivers that basically serve as safe mode anyway.

At this point, the only options I can think to try is to use RepairBoot in Ubuntu to purge Grub2 and reinstall Grub (legacy), but I'm afraid of wiping out the MBR and not being able to get back into the Windows partition (natively or otherwise), which has happened many times in the past.

Any suggestions...besides just creating a stand-alone Ubuntu VM? Booting the physical partition used to "just work" and I want it to work again. Parallels needs to get on the ball because the quickest and easiest solution appears to be simply moving on to VMWare...
 
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