eol macbooks, can Linux save the day?

[codyretrac]

I recently found my buster old MacBook air, it's a 2011 model and apple recently ended support of it, which would have been nice to know before I tried updating it. The update completely wiped the drive and is. So now I have this aluminum paper weight covered in stickers.

 

My question here is if I put a Linux install, something like pop_OS! on a USB key, could I boot it onto there with my paper weight sitting in osx utilities? When I attempt to reinstall os x, it errors with a missing download.

 

 

[manikyath]

well.. i guess you may as well try. i know of several people who done the macbook with linux thing, i'm just not sure how things go on the bootloader side.

[Ashleyyyy]

yes you can do that. put the usb stick into the laptop, hold down option and boot it up. from there install like you would on any other computer. 

[Fasauceome]

You can still probably take it to the apple store and have them install MacOS, worth a shot

[D.U.F.F.]

-Censored-

[elsandosgrande]

Well, here's something I found with a simple DuckDuckGo search: https://www.imore.com/how-try-out-linux-aging-mac

I see no issues with the procedures described in the article.

[codyretrac]

So I ended up booting pop!_os to it, but I'm pretty sure everything that was on the drive is gone. Thank you for the links!

[Lenovo1984]

14 hours ago, codyretrac said:

So I ended up booting pop!_os to it, but I'm pretty sure everything that was on the drive is gone. Thank you for the links!

If you were looking for your data, you would need to use macOS to see that partition. 

[elsandosgrande]

@Lenovo1984 Can't Linux see HFS+ and AFS?

[Lenovo1984]

On 12/4/2019 at 6:10 PM, elsandosgrande said:

@Lenovo1984 Can't Linux see HFS+ and AFS?

It may be able to, I haven't tried that in a while. 

[lionsland]

Sidenote, if you want to update to a newer mac os version, check out dosdude1's patchers

[Underfire17]

I would think that putting that on the laptop wouldn't a bad idea. My last netbook has Ubuntu on it, and from what I can see, it works fine. I just looked up how heavy it is on resources, and it looks like Pop OS is actually recommened for your laptop. I'd say try it.

[vorticalbox]

On 12/4/2019 at 11:47 AM, Lenovo1984 said:

If you were looking for your data, you would need to use macOS to see that partition. 

Assuming the drive is encrypted you can use data recovery tools such as foremost to scan for deleted files.

[riklaunim]

Running the macbook in recovery mode and installing the OS should fetch the latest that it supports. It should not leave it without an system.