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Out with the old, in with the new comma A1 terabyte Samsung SSD to replace the Corsair it that kept preventing my laptop from restoring from sleep for the last couple years. That was fun! Also pulling out the stupid HDD so I get a little more battery life, with a little luck.

At some point, refind stopped booting up my Macbook, and I had to use the Option (read: Alt if you’re not drinking the koolaid) key on startup to get back into OS X.  For which the drive was completely full.  Some things I went through to get going again:

  • deleted my partition table during a fit of aggressive frustration.  That was useful!  Fortunately I had gparted up and running when I did it, so with a litle math, I was able to rebuild the partition using sfdisk (also sgdisk and gdisk and … but sfdisk instructions here were clear).
  • I need to boot my Macbook with no keyboard or mouse plugged in (I suspect the mouse was nonstandard and causing driver issues)
  • Reinstall refind, and actually follow the instructions to put the boot driver in the specified place.
  • Use [nouveau.noaccel=1] with ANY recent ubuntu on my Macbook to get past nvidia hardware lockup – follow these steps to get a real nvidia driver installed that won’t lock up:
     sudo ubuntu-drivers devices      # get list of drivers
     sudo apt-get install nvidia-###  # choose ### from list
  • Make the call and reinstall OSes as needed.  Ubuntu was fairly painless to reinstall on top of existing install, now that I have great notes on setting it up, and I am getting pretty good at saving my configurations.  Remember to keep config files pushed to repo as you change them!

Down to three OSes now, ubuntu, windows, OS X.

I just updated my Macbook Pro, removing the Super Drive and adding an SSD, following this awesome, concise and precise video.

It was as good a time as any to refresh everything.

Here’s the result:

CHOOSE!

These are a few of my favorite things…

And here is the partitioning to get it done:

quad-boot-partitions

Here are my highlights (cautionary tales, really) from the experience. I’m not taking the time to do a full writeup, since it was a specific upgrade, not a clean install, but add a comment if you have a specific question for me. (continued…)

I dropped my Macbook Pro laptop on the concrete sidewalk on the short walk to work a couple weeks ago. I had popped the messenger bag shoulder strap up off my shoulder to pull my coat out, and didn’t quite catch it on the way down. Blammo. Turns out that when push comes to shove, concrete retains its shape a lot better than aluminum. All the USB ports on my Macbook Pro 5.2 were instantly transformed into trapezoids, as the corner crumpled up like a soft soda can.

Those Apple folks know what they’ve got going, and do a good job of treating people with no regard for money well. $600 later I had a lot of heartburn, but also had a 50% brand new MBP that worked perfectly. Too bad the 50% included the hard drive. 🙁

Anyway… long story short -too late-… my clean hard drive emboldened me to finally install all the OSes I needed. What does it take to get my four favorite ones squeezed onto one fat-assed macbook pro? A little more pain than should really be necessary. The moral of the story is that this is the stuff you play with when you don’t really care if you blow all your data away. No, really. Back up anything you care about first. Technical details start up after the break… (continued…)