Ultimate Boot CD

Since I had my hands on a fairly new Macbook Pro 13" (C2D T7550 2.2 GHz, nV GF9400, 2GB DDR3), out of pure curiosity I popped in my remastered UBCD, and lo and behold, it booted!!!

I haven't been able to find any threads here pertaining to Mac support, so I thought I would start this and share some quick notes I found just from playing around.

1) The core menus work perfectly! I could navigate around the various menus no problem with either ISOLINUX/SYSLINUX or GRUB4DOS! even the FreeDOS Launch Applications menu works!

2) PartedMagic 4.10 would work, but under xvesa only. I also had to manually select 1280x800 resolution. It also didn't pick up the wireless card (Broadcom BCM4311 802.11n) but wired ethernet LAN worked just fine. It mounted both Win7 NTFS and OSX HFS partitions r/w along with the SD card in the built-in card reader!!

3) some DOS-based apps would load (ie. memtest86+, Seagate Seatools) but mouse or keyboard input was impossible, whether from the built-in keyboard + touchpad or a USB keyboard/mouse. I blame Apple's EFI (there's no BIOS code in these anymore!! ) + the fact FreeDOS would have to be compiled with a whole bunch of custom machine detection logic and BIOS code and TSR drivers.... ugh

4) other DOS apps would not load: HWiNFO complained about not enough memory; Hitachi DFT prompted for a diskette in drive B:; plus other odd things....

5) one quirk with FreeDOS: the memory manager/kernel menu would often accept one keystroke and then not accept any more

5) other Linux apps also seem to work (ie. DBAN, HDClone)

This is about the extent of my informal testing. If anyone wants me to test some more things off the UBCD I'll be happy to do so, but let me know ASAP as I only have this MBP for a couple more days (I have to return it this weekend ). Still, if we can make UBCD work close-to-100% on these systems we would have an awesome toolkit for when we have to troubleshoot these.

I'm honestly amazed this much actually works...... if anyone else has a mac to test on, I would like to know what your observations are, so please share!

That's great news. The hardest part, when it comes to linux, is driver support; esp. with wireless cards. I have had heck of a time getting several different wireless cards working right and even then they are buggy.

Thanks for taking the time to share your results!!

Has anyone figured out how to get keyboard and mouse working on Intel Macs?

I don't have any PCs anymore so would really appreciate if this tool worked on the Mac.

Thanks.

I do own a MBP, recently purchased used is perfect condition, I have yet to test out any tools myself personally. Ill have to try it out at some point and see what I can do. I wouldn't expect any miracles...


I would like to note, this topic is 4 years old...just an fyi.

I understand that it's an old thread. I was hoping with more Macs being found in business and homes that perhaps UBCD might have added support but I was too dense to figure out how to get it to work.

Please report back your progress. I'm sure there are lots of people who would find UBCD useful for booting on Macs.

Thanks for the reply and supporting this great tool!

Well I can confirm booting from CD works fine. Even Parted Magic works great, take a look (Click Proceed anyways, I self signed my own SSL certificate.):

https://cloud.stopspazzing.com/public.p ... f5f256d02d

Gparted shows correct SSD and partitions as HFS+. Everything seems to work on Parted Magic. Even Wireless worked!

I have yet to test UFD or other tools. But so far good news.

So the keyboard and mouse work? Cool. How did you do that? I can't get it to work.

Using latest UBCD 5.2.9 on CDRW burned with imgburn, couldn't get it to work yet on UFD. I held down Options key at boot and select the "CD" and under it says Windows. It then booted into syslinux. I also tried Grub4dos menu and it also loaded.

Thanks, I think that is what I did.

Now could you try to open one of the gui apps from the menu and try to use the keyboard or mouse and let me know if it works for you?

I tried to run the Seagate Tools 2.x version and then 1.x version. The first being the gui version which I couldn't use because no keyboard or mouse. THen tried the command line (1.x) version and keyboard wouldn't work.

Thanks.

bunk3m wrote:Thanks, I think that is what I did.

Now could you try to open one of the gui apps from the menu and try to use the keyboard or mouse and let me know if it works for you?

I tried to run the Seagate Tools 2.x version and then 1.x version. The first being the gui version which I couldn't use because no keyboard or mouse. THen tried the command line (1.x) version and keyboard wouldn't work.

Thanks.

Yes I tested this, the tools seem to be hit or miss with keyboard. The parted magic OS works however.