Getting Linux to boot on macbook pro

Hello, this is my first post here as Im pretty new to mac stuff so be gentle

Basiacally Im trying to triple boot my macbook pro with OSX, Vista, and Suse Linux, and I'm having trouble getting Linux to boot. Ive installed windows with boot camp, and I'm using REFIt as a boot manager. I partitioned the 120GB disk into 50gb OSX, 50GB Windows, 2GB Swap for linux and the rest ext3 for linux.

The problem is getting Linux to boot. Refit lists all OS and OSX and Vista are booting ok, but if I try to boot linux I get "No bootable device found -- Insert porper boot media". Ive set up lilo.conf and installed lilo properly as far as I can tell.

So has anyone seen this before or know what would cause it?

did you install linux? i don't know much about suse, but it would also help if you mentioned where you installed lilo. mbr? or efi?

also... more importantly... how did you partition your disk? it looks like you have 5 partitions which means 1 of them has to be an extended partition

this could be your problem. you may have to drop the swap partition so you just have
1)efi
2)hfs+
3)ntfs
4)linux/ext3

Thanks for the quick reply aarnclayt

Yes Ive installed Suse, and I believe Suse is on the MBR. I installed suse without a boot loader and then booted to a live CD and installed it using /sbin/lilo

The partitions, I originally had it layed out as you said but the suse installer suggested a swap so I added one thinking it made sense. Ill try and remove the swap.

removing the swap now won't make a difference - I just wanted to make sure that suse was on a primary partition and not an extended one.

the only other thing i can think of is that your linux partition wasn't formatted as bootable.

sorry i cant be of more help

just another sidenote. i've only ever used grub as a boot loader, but i've never had any trouble with it. i'm running arch linux and os x at the moment and have no problems at boot.

Subscribed... going to be attempting the same thing on a MBP 5,1 running Leopard 10.5.5, XP SP3 and openSUSE11 or SLES 10.

****, three operating systems on a single laptop? Too much for it if you ask me.

It shouldn't be too much, its not like they all run at the same time. The only concern for me is disk space, but seeing as I keep most of my files on an external disk anyway thats not really a problem. I have however just introduced a new problem for myself by making a mistake installing vista again and wiping the EFI partition. That coupled with the fact I left my OSX DVD at work is making one **** of a pain in my neck. Sooo, Ill have to try again Monday when Ive got my disk back.