3 replies to this topic

[elim]

I did this to my D630 T7500 a couple days ago.

There are almost no tricks to make a triple boot system except 3 items:

(1) HDD partition scheme is MBR, complete the partition layout before installing osx, linux (leave non-windows partitions alloced but unformatted ). This is needed for xp or older versions of windows.
(2) Format mac, linux partitions at their installation time using installer's disk utility and/or linux installation wizard. This is possible with osx if the usb installer is created by myHack
(3) Specify linux boot loader installation location to the partition where your linux mount point / is. The linux installer tends to install grub to the active partition that'll damage the existing boot loader there, so you have to avoid that.

Now if you've completed all the post osx installation work such as install and rebuild EDP, install chameleon, you've got the triple boot system with chameleon as boot manager already!

When boot from the cool machine, when you see the shrinking time bar of chameleon boot loader, hit a key, you see the boot menu that lists all the installed OS partitions with Window, Apple, Penguin icons

Of course the osx partition needs to be the active one which can be done automatically if you erase the osx partition and install osx after other OS's.

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Some more considerations

What if I like to have more OS's installed, what if I like to have home partitions for both windows and linux so that I can re-install/retrieve the os without lost all the developer work and user preferences (I tried the something for osx but not work well for some reason)? More than 4 partitions can be done if logical partitions grouped by extended partition(s). Here is what I did:

Partition I: WinXP (primary, Ntfs)
Partition II: OSX (primary, mac os extended (Journaled))
Partition III Extended
(a) Workplace (logical, Ntfs)
(b) / (logical, linux ext4)
(c) /home (logical, linux ext4)
Partition IV linux swap


I did the layout using partition magic after installed windows. But this can be done by other ways of course.

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Idea and challenges

Put together multi-boot system is a nice thing for those who travels and need to work on different OS's. Multi boot is better than VM machines for performance, but you just cannot work with more than one OS at the same time that way. So if there is a way that I can run windows installed in a partition beside of mac partition within osx, it should be ideal, much better than run windows vm as a gigantic file in osx. I did this with win7 and SL dual boot iMac and parallels desktop 6 mac. Where win7 is automatically discovered and picked up by parallels. But for Xp without bootcamp, I don't know how to make things work. Any ideas?

[Syonagar]

Dear elim,

You may want to read our guide above on dual booting windows and os x.

Installing Windows XP on gpt disk is just a matter of creating a new partition, gptsync it and install.

Cheers!

[elim]

gptsync is interesting! I don't know this before. If I got more info about it, I'll give it a try.

[Rhyker]

also just check out my signature ... eh yeah. Used to be in there. Use the search!

Update2: http://forum.osxlati...ndpost__p__7938

Edited by Rhyker, 25 June 2012 - 05:24 AM.