They use something similar called Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). Not sure if its roughly the same as BIOS but both manage the boot process it seems.
My limited research seems to indicate that the MacBook EFI will not recognise an external drive as bootable unless it is configured with the GUID partition scheme (or table). Seems this may be the case for all Intel based Macs. I have managed to install and book Leopard from a USB drive but it was GUID. I have successfuly booted Solaris (snv_76) on my MacBook using an internal drive with MBR partition scheme. This same drive is not recognised as a bootable drive when connected via USB. I have been unable to install Solaris on a GUID partition scheme drive - this seems to be due to a Solaris bug that is currenly being worked on. I will probably have a go at installing Leopard on a USB drive with MBR to see if this is bootable because some posts seem to indicate the MacBook will only present USB drives that have a bootable version of Mac OS X. Seems the MacBook will handle CDs, DVDs or internal drives with other operating systems although these are presented to the user as Windows bootable drives !! The other option you might consider is using rEFIt - as this seems to provide more boot options than are normally available on the mac. I could not figure out exactly what boot option eEFIt will support though. Cheers This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-help mailing list [email protected]
