I installed Mint on this old Mac. I used this tutorial.
The day after yesterday: Current status: First it worked all fine, but now grub doesn't appear anymore if I turn the Mac on and using my Liveboot-Stick I can't find the 500GB Hard Drive with MacOS and Mint. I'm confused, tired and I don't know if I ever can get the MacOS-Data back.
I followed the tutorial and created 3 FAT-Partitions as described. Creating them took the Mac up to 45min which might be relevant, might not. I also created a bootable stick on my arch computer using kde's isoimagewriter. Then it was too late in night so I stopped there and did the rest today.
Yesterday: I installed Linux Mint with the Liveboot-Stick.
Oddity 1: When I turned on the Mac with the Liveboot stick connected and pressed Alt, not 1 but 2 EFI boot options appeared, both seemed to be identical, both Mint. There were these 2 options and the MacOS + MacOS recovery. I didn't know which Mint to boot, so I just choosed the one at the right. I got into the Liveboot and clicked on Install Linux Mint on the Desktop.
I followed all instructions and formatted the 3 FAT Partions as described in the tutorial. Then I rebooted without the Liveboot-stick. After the reboot, grub appeared and I had the option to boot Linux Mint. Everything worked fine. If I turned the Mac on and pressed Alt, I could also boot MacOS. Still I followed the tutorial and said "sudo efibootmgr -o 0,80". I tought it would be better to follow the turtorial completly, although I seemed to not need it. Last step of the tutorial was a bit different, I connected to the internet by selecting Broadcom Driver in the Driver Menu. It worked although the Driver description said the driver was broken. I rebooted again. Mint seemed to be fine. Only problem: I couldn't load updates/new software. I clicked on "Update all" in the Update Manager and it only updated a few packages, then crashed multiple times (I tried it multiple times). It had some problems with 6 packages, I don't remember their names. I don't know much about debian-based systems so I just used some internet fixes, rebooted many, many times and typed apt get update, apt get upgrade. Sometimes the Mac chrashed while being in terminal. Upgrade said -I think it was- gtk-3 which wouldn't download correctly because of some archive certification error. I typed sudo apt-get clean and it cleaned everything. Again a lot of reboots.
Oddity 2: During these reboots, sometimes grub disapeared when turning the Mac on, it wouldn't load grub and only show this screen without text and in light mode. So I had to press Alt to get into EFI-grub. Sometimes it crashed while booting in EFI-grub and I had to force shutdowns multiple times.
At some point I typed sudo apt update, sudo apt upgrade and it started to update all 200 packages. It seemed to work. But while upgrading, the computer crashed. Black screen, only one white _ at the upper left corner. I waited 10 minutes and finally turned it off manually. After that, it wouldn't boot anymore. When turning the Mac on, it doesn't load grub and again only shows the apple no boot option screen without text and in light mode. Even worse: If I turn it on and press Alt, only the Mac internet recovery appears. No MacOS-Boot, no Mint. Even worse: If I liveboot and try to Install Linux Mint again, it crashes when I try to change something at the partitioning screen. And if I type lsblk or fdisk -l into the terminal, it only shows my 30GB-Liveboot-stick and no 500GB hard drive. Damn. My guess would be it just crashed during the upgrade and thus grub is broken. But why cant I find the hard disk then? And why were there these weird problems with grub while rebooting?
Today:
When I turned the Mac on, grub instantly loaded and I could boot Linux Mint, but couldn't get into the account, although I used the right password. Also while Mint booted, the recovery terminal appeared 2secs and after that a user login terminal without UI appeared, only after that the normal UI loaded. I shut the computer down using the login UI, while it turned off some error meesages apperaed 1sec on the screen, I couldn't read them. After that I could get into MacOS by turning the Mac on and pressing Alt. I could login and check if there are some files I haven't backuped yet. The Mac froze at some point (which he sometimes also did before installing Linux Mint) and I forced a shutdown. Turned it on and again no hard drive found.
Does anyone know what happend? Guesses? How to fix it? My current guess is that MacOS and 2010-Mac-hardware don't like sharing the hard disk with Linux.
Including AIs.