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I have a 2011 MacBook Pro where I took out the optical drive and replaced it with a second hard drive, but I'm looking to dual boot Slackware. These machines can't boot from USB sticks for whatever reason, and the optical drive is out, so I'm wondering if anyone can give me some pointers on what to do here.
wjl
Posted 2011-09-10T01:09:49.673
Reputation: 295
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If your machine can boot via PXE and you have another machine hooked in a cabled LAN, you can install Slackware following this great tutorial:
c4baf058
Posted 2011-09-10T01:09:49.673
Reputation: 368
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I found an excellent tutorial on installing Linux from Windows without any Optical Drives or USB drives. But, many things still apply if you start from OSX. You'll just have to "translate" a bit.
If you are interested, here it is: http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html
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I'm not exactly familiar with how OS X handles dualbooting, but i'd give unetbootin a look - it should let you download and boot from an ISO, which you should be able to bootstrap an install from, and supports OS X.
While its primarily for creating liveusb, least on the other two OSes it supports, booting off an existing hard drive is supported
Journeyman Geek
Posted 2011-09-10T01:09:49.673
Reputation: 119 122
Buy a USB adapter to connect your optical drive. IDE or SATA to use adapters are cheap. – Zoredache – 2011-09-10T01:16:21.807
Your machine is capable of booting from a USB flash drive, the drive may not be formatted correctly. – Dustin G. – 2011-09-10T02:58:41.763
There's a lot of people who don't know how to format a USB flash drive. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1125135
– wjl – 2011-09-10T03:11:41.843