Linux install will not detect HD on macbok pro

I just got a macbook pro. For the past several days I have been trying to get linux installed on it. I first tried redhat 9.0 (I use this distro for research purposes), but the installer could not detect the hard drive. I also tried several fedora versions, but all gave me teh same problem. I even tried a knoppix live cd, same exact thing.

As far as the HD goes, I tried it without repartitionig the hard drive at all, I tried it after partitioning with bootcamp, and I tried it after partitioning it using diskutil. The partitions I tried were fat32.

No matter what I do, the installers are not seeing a hard drive at all! I do have rEFIt installed also. Any suggestions at all are welcome, I have tried everything I could think of to get this to work with no luck. The only thing I have not tried is partitioning the drive from scratch and reinstalling OSX, but I am trying not to. I don't see how that would be any different than creating a partition using diskutil. Thaks for any help!

I personally use Ubuntu in a virtualbox VM on my MBP, but I have read quite a bit about people doing a full on dual boot of it and I believe you should partition it as empty space w/ boot camp instead of formatting it. Some Linux distros can run on FAT32, but not very well, and even if you're just making the partition in FAT32 so you can reformat it to an EXT filesystem later, it might still give you some trouble. Try using other distros since there could be an issue with a SATA driver loaded by default keeping it from seeing your disk at all. Something Debian based might be worth a shot like Gentoo, Mepis, or Ubuntu. Otherwise, check out the Ubuntu forums (www.ubuntuforums.org) and their subforum dedicated to Intel Macs. I know it is possible to get going but I do not have first hand experience with it since I run windows and linux in virtual machines on my MBP and leave the native installs for my desktop comps. Good luck!

In my case it needs to be redhat because an API that I use only works with this distro.

I took your advice and downloaded a trial copy of parallels....WOW! This thing is amazing! I'm running redhat with no problems yet, and it is FAST. Thanks for the tip!

Also try Virtualbox and VMware Fusion. I use the completely free Virtualbox now because they no longer have the free beta of VMware Fusion available, but both are really nice apps. I know that Fusion has some DX 8.1 support if you ever run windows too and they now have a quite seamless integration mode where you can just run windows/linux apps right on your OS X desktop. Right now I run windows and Ubuntu 7.04 off of my eSATA II external drive using Virtualbox and it is quite fast (finally, a good use for the expresscard34 slot!). The only pitfall is you can't game in a virtual machine, but by no means does that make them useless.

I ran into one setback with parallels today, it has no firewire support (which I need). Any idea if virtualbox does or no? I haven't been able to find much by searching.

To the best of my knowledge no virtual machine servers support firewire (at least ones for OSX hosts). I wish they did too as I have a firewire external drive.