Unfortunately, my thinkpad died the other day and until i can get it repaired i have an old MacBook Pro 2,1 to use. I would like to take my boot drive out of the thinkpad and put it into the Macbook.
Issue is that the old macs have 32bit EFI and my GRUB is 64 bit.
At this point, im thinking i would be able to chroot into my boot drive from another computer and install grub32 bit, then throw that drive into the Mac an hope everything works.
Any advice? Thanks!
Not possible with grub, but with refind you would have more luck.
Why not? My concern is that the macbook wont be able to fire up the 64 bit .efi file, but grub2 allows installation with target i386, which generates a 32 bit .efi file.
Unless im missing something and refind circumvents this hardware limitation
I should also add that my boot partition is LUKS encrypted, so booting with my existing grub.cfg would be quite advantageous
You can boot the live system and work with that - temporarily.
Even save files.
Not a problem.
But actually changing the boot loader
temporarily
and switch it back
on a Mac
nahh ā¦
doable - but:
experience and expertise / knowledge needed
ā¦ and that as well, on top of it 
Well, do what you need. I see you know better than me. Wish you much success
doable - but:
experience and expertise / knowledge needed
Can you expand on that since thats what im trying to do? 
No - that is what I cannot do - I never had enough cash to waste on a Mac
Thus: no experience with them.
Never in my life have I bought a brand new computer of any brand.
But I know that when the live system is up - it can access and save files to the native file system.
ā¦ or:
it can be made to be able to do that
That is all ā¦
Understandable, thank you. I believe i would need to modify the Manjaro ISO in nearly the same way to get it to boot anyway.
I suppose i could also do a fresh install and then rsync over my root partition, excluding the boot directory / partition. However that would require another drive and im not sure i have one large enoughā¦ definitely not an SSD
Would be a safe way to do it though
Have a look at āOption 2ā here: Linux DVD images (and how-to) for 32-bit EFI Macs (late 2006 models) | mattgadient.com
As has already been mentioned, you could likely use the rEFInd UEFI Bootloader, and in so doing, bypass the need to mess with GRUB 2.
A 32-bit UEFI implementation is useless for Manjaro. This much is true. What is preventing you from removing the macOS $ESP? Is there an existing OS on the Mac that you wish to keep?
I just got the laptop(s) from my parents house and, turns out, there is no drive in it. I got rEFInd onto a USB drive and am able to boot that. Because of the LUKS encryption on my ārealā boot drive, rEFInd is unable to see it (boot is on the encrypted root partition with only the EFI partition being unencrypted).
Now I am flashing a Manjaro live CD onto a second USB drive to see if I can boot that via rEFInd.
Iām thinking that the ābestā course of action would be to somehow move /boot onto a second USB drive that rEFInd can see / bootā¦ my fstab is all UUIDs, so thereās a chance of this working.
If I am able to do that, then I can put the drive into the MBP and Iāll just need 2 flash drives to boot. I should be able to remove at least the rEFInd drive after boot up.
One of the laptops is the MBP 2,1 weāve been discussing and the other is newer. I believe that one (a unibody) will boot 64bit EFI, however the trackpad is brokenā¦ so I have the option of struggle to boot or struggle to use lol. Iād like to get the 2,1 working for nostalgia sake as well as it having a working trackpad. The newer one also has hybrid graphics, which is a whole other world of hurt to get working with Linux (when I was using this laptop I settled for intel gpu only with no external display support for battery life), but of course Appleās implementation is far from standard.
rEFInd should then be able to chainload the .efi file within the Manjaro directory (on the $ESP), which launches GRUB - This should be one of the two Manjaro āiconsā showing - the other, bypasses GRUB completely and launches the kernel stub (this wonāt work with encryption).
rEFInd doesnāt need to see /, as GRUB takes over.
hmmm rEFInd doesnāt see anything with my boot drive plugged in. It does show an entry with the live CD plugged it. However it doesnāt boot. Throws a ānot found returned from legacy loaderā error 
rEFInd doesnāt need to see
/, as GRUB takes over.
Thatās the result I was hoping for, but like I saidā¦ rEFInd doesnāt show any entries from the boot drive
Seems like itās trying to boot from BIOS modeā¦
Youāre in uncharted territory here, to some extent. Letās backtrack a little and look at other options. If I understand it, you just need a functioning OS until the ThinkPad is repaired, correct?
This is a possible workaround, without messing with your existing disk; and by not messing with it, you should be able to just plug it into your ThinkPad when itās fixed, without any fuss.
This is a FreeBSD-based OS designed to run only from a USB drive (minimum 8GB, 32GB is better). You basically write the downloaded image to a USB, and then boot with it. It will save a lot of time and energy.
Have a look at it, and see if that might be enough to get you through the next few weeks, or whatever.
Iāve got an update! Tried again on the newer computer, and I got a LUKS password prompt, then a grub screen and I do believe itās booting (walked away to type this)
So there does just seem to be an issue with the 64bit binary of GRUB.
Yup, it is indeed running. Extremely slow over USB2ā¦ but itās running.
Well, the later machine is the obvious choice. 
Technically yesā¦ but I would like my install 
Understood. That would be my preference also. Take a look at Nomad in any case, if you find a few minutes, as it can also be useful as a rescue disk, of sorts.
For now though, it looks like youāre good to go. Cheers.