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Discussion => Security => Topic started by: heatcheck on June 26, 2013, 09:42 pm

Title: Booting Tails on a MacBook Pro
Post by: heatcheck on June 26, 2013, 09:42 pm
I use a MBP as my everyday laptop. I successfully installed Tails on a USB but I cannot get it to boot on my laptop. When I put on rEFInd, I can start the boot but it stops on a black screen with a blinking underscore and never moves further.

Does anyone boot Tails on a Mac running the latest OS? If you do, how do you do it?

Any and all help is so greatly appreciated.
Title: Re: Booting Tails on a MacBook Pro
Post by: heavysmoker on June 26, 2013, 10:24 pm
I tried for a long time to get tails running on my macbook pro and also on a macbook.  I downloaded and installed rEFind like you did and i had the exact same problems you reported.  I was not able to get tails running from a USB with a persistent volume, i could not figure out what the problem was. 

I finally just burned the tails disk image to a DVD and ran it from the disk.  Tails runs a little slower from the disk, but its not a huge issue for me.  I also made an encrypted flash drive that i used as a persistent volume so i can save PGP keys and other info.

If anyone is able to run tails from a USB on a macbook please share.  My setup is ok, but i would love to have everything on the same USB drive.
Title: Re: Booting Tails on a MacBook Pro
Post by: dontek on June 26, 2013, 11:56 pm
X3.
I have a post on here somewhere about this. I need to find it to see if there have been any updates. ATM, I am running a VPN > Virtual Machine > Tails > TOR.
Don't have a persistent volume, but everything that I need to know is in my brain or saved in anonymously created email accounts in case I forget anything.
Title: Re: Booting Tails on a MacBook Pro
Post by: Rastaman Vibration on June 27, 2013, 06:04 pm
I'm having similar issues. I can get Tails to boot up just fine on my Dell, and I set up  persistent volume no problem. But when I stick the USB key in my MacBook Air that I use for work stuff it wont boot. I tried it on an old MacBook too, and its a no go. It seems like the problem has to do with the Mac's firmware - it doesnt support booting anything that's not MacOS from USB.

If there's any way to get it to work, I would think that the way to do it would be to format the USB stick in a way that the Mac likes before installing Tails on it. Unfortunately Tails doesn't offer a lot of customization options when it comes to installing on the USB stick.

Anyone know how to do that using the command line?
Title: Re: Booting Tails on a MacBook Pro
Post by: ws on July 07, 2013, 03:30 pm
Has anyone found a solution to this?

I am able to downloaded ISO and burn onto a DVD however I am trying to install the latest tails onto a USB so I can configure persistant volume but cant get it to work.

I have rEFInd working on mac for a start, I follow all instructions but cant get beyond this point...

Download syslinux.
Double click on the package to extract it.
Copy isohybrid.pl from the /utils folder to the desktop.
Copy the ISO image (for example tails-i386-0.17.1.iso) to the desktop.

To change directory into the desktop, execute:

cd Desktop

Has anyone else had any luck with this???