Dual Boot Issues

Hey guys,


I was working on my Mac that I had installed Linux Mint onto as a completely independant partion from my Catalina partition for a school project that I was working on and was going to erase it once I was done.


Well I finished doing what I wanted to do and had booted back into the MacOS in order to begin formating the Linux partition that I made. I opened up Disk Utility and began removing the Home Directory for Linux Mint, but then my Mac cut out and I was at the install screen for Linux while booted in MacOS. I susupected that this was unusual behavior and had shut down my Mac.


Upon booting up my Mac while holding Option, my Macintosh HD was gone, but my EFI Boot for Linux was there. Upon booting into recovery per support article HT201314 About MacOS Recovery, instead my Mac booted into internet recovery.


At this point in time, I'm reinstalling my OS and I doubt I'll be able to recover logs from my Mac about what happened for the feedback App, Regardless of that, anything important was already backed up, and all the data on my Mac is disposable as it should be using beta software, but my concern comes from the fact that the behavior that shouldn't have happened did happen.


Now I know it is outside support guidelines to work with Linux, but my concern comes from the fact that if this was Windows using bootcamp, would it be possible the same behavior to occur? Ideas?

Replies

The main purposes of the DP is to get updates ready before the release, so I guess it's understandable that multiple bootloaders can lead to some trouble. Even boot camp, I don't recall there being much focus on in the DPs, maybe places like vmware have it differently. But the thing is there are dual boot issues even for Mojave and Catalina on the same drive (at least one is documented in the release notes). And yes preview builds can fail irrecoverably and yes we're warned about that (very real) possibility but I don't know about you, but I expected them to be soft failures, not machine-doesnt-post-anymore-after-install-problems, especially on supported hardware.


I bricked an iMac trying to install Catalina, on a separate drive from Mojave. Some people are saying upgrading from Mojave to Catalina, single OS partition, crippled their machine in various ways, so now I don't even know what. I had thought it made more sense to install test builds on older machines that I wouldn't miss too much if it had to be wiped and restored, but now, I'm buying new machines to install beta releases on, because if I brick another machine that's out of warranty, it's probably going to get me a $900 quote for mlb replacement or a lot of headaches mucking around with a spi programmer and a pomona clip.</rant>


But as for your question I'd almost expect something to go wrong with boot camp and windows, and probably would have bet that dual booting linux wouldn't work. It sounds like you don't have any semi-permanent issues, so that's good. Which mac was this? Is it one with the T2? What's the controller for your drive? (I'm just curious, I can't seem to find a real pattern in people's failed configurations)