MacBookPro won’t boot Tails, other live distros do

During a Tails workshop with a human rights organization, we ran into a problem booting a Tails 3.3 intermediate drive, which we created by using dd after downloading and checking the file’s PGP signature to make sure the iso image wasn’t corrupted.

Participants had MacBookPro 13,2 and MacBookPro 14,3 models, and in the built-in Apple boot selector, none of them showed the USB device as a boot option—only Macintosh HD showed up as an option. Other live Linux distributions created using the same dd command worked, including Kali Linux (created with dd the same way the Kali distro was) and Black Arch (created with Etcher.io). The USB model we used to created a Kali and Tails drive was a Micro Center USB 3.0 8GB drive, same model type, but only the Kali one worked. The Black Arch drive was also a Micro Center USB 3.0 drive, but a 32GB model.

We didn’t anticipate we’d run into this problem since there was no mention of it being an issue in https://tails.boum.org/support/known_issues/. Any idea what the problem is and why Kali and Black Arch are not affected and Tails OS is? One of the Tails drives created worked on a Thinkpad x140e, so we suspect this is due to a lack of hardware support for the new Macbook Pros, which unfortunately is all this organization has.

Related issues

• Related to #15025 (closed)

Original created by @huertanix on 15021 (Redmine)