Difference between revisions of "Macbook pro triple-boot"

Revision as of 01:54, 11 March 2008

Windows Vista 64-bit version can use EFI, which could make the whole partitioning scheme easier?

giving up on Vista 64-bit now, damn non-free Vista... XP/MBR it is

start with new Macbook Pro (15", 2.6ghz, 200GB 7200rpm HDD, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT/512MB)
made bootable rEFIt 0.11 disk
Install Boot-camp; Run the Boot Camp Assistant and create the Windows XP driver cd.

* Go into Applications/Utilities
* Open Boot Camp Assistant. Print out the Instructions.
* Partition the drive by using the graphical slider in the Assistant and Accept the changes. Insert the XP disk. Let it reboot your system. It will load up into the XP installer. Install XP. After it is all installed and setup and you are in Windows, put in your Leopard disk and the drivers will install for all the devices( mouse, mic, iSight, video, etc). You are done.

BootCampInstallationSetupGuide.pdf

"diskutil list"

robert-hamiltons-macbook-pro:Desktop rob$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *186.3 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            186.0 Gi   disk0s2

186.3 (total) = disk0s2 146G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Linux" 20G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Windows" 20G

sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 146.3G "Linux" "Linux" 20G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Windows" 20G

enable root user now using "Directory Utility" ("Edit" menu > "Enable Root User...") in Applications/Utilities

NOTE: some guides here say type "Linux" "Linux"... but I get error saying "Linux does not appear to be a valid file system fomat. Valid filesystems: "Journaled HFS+" "HFS+" "Case-sensitive HFS+" "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" "HFS" "MS-DOS FAT16" "MS-DOS FAT32" "MS-DOS FAT12" "MS-DOS" "UDF" "UFS" "ZFS"

sh-3.2# sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 146G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Linux" 20G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Windows" 20G
Started resizing on disk disk0s2 Macintosh HD
Verifying 
Resizing Volume 
Adjusting Partitions
Formatting new partitions
Formatting disk0s4 as MS-DOS (FAT32) with name Windows
Formatting disk0s3 as MS-DOS (FAT32) with name Linux
[ + 0%..10%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..70%..80%..90%..100% ] 
Finished resizing on disk disk0
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *186.3 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            145.9 Gi   disk0s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data LINUX                   20.0 Gi    disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data WINDOWS                 20.1 Gi    disk0s4

rebooted

robert-hamiltons-macbook-pro:~ rob$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
  #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
  0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *186.3 Gi   disk0
  1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
  2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            145.9 Gi   disk0s2
  3:       Microsoft Basic Data LINUX                   20.0 Gi    disk0s3
  4:       Microsoft Basic Data WINDOWS                 20.1 Gi    disk0s4

Windows XP install begins
"To set up Windows XP now, press ENTER"

190780 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]
    F: Partition1 [Unknown]                200 MB  <     200 MB free>
    G: Partition2 [Unknown]             149376 MB  <    149376 MB free>
       Unpartitioned space                 128 MB
    C: Partition3 <LINUX>  [FAT32]       20480 MB  < 20469 MB free>
    D: Partition4 <WINDOWS> [FAT32]      20598 MB  < 20587 MB free>

here I chose "D:" for my windows Install... but then ran into problems... probably my first of many mistakes... Windows seems to be having problems... drink a scotch and see if it works better...

enabled rEFIt... installed by double-click

poked around online and read a bit
booted back into OS X and used Disk Utility to wipe the Windows partition... lets try again...
re-installing Win XP... this time will try C: drive... strange because I read it has to be last partition and I thought the D: was last... maybe my windows will be named Linux and my Linux will be named Windows

ahhh this is interesting: ( http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Talk:Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp )

While attempting to manually partition my disk for tripple boot (J-HFS+, J-HFS+, FAT-32), I ran into a situation where the windows installer would see the target partition as type "FAT-32" instead of "unknown", and so would not offer to reformat it prior to installation. Consequently, the windows partition was not bootable, and I received "Disk error" any time I tried to boot from it.
One solution is to nuke the first bit of the windows partition with zeros, destroying the filesystem metadata. This causes the Windows installer to see the partition as type "unknown", and it will then dutifuly offer to reformat it for you. This can be accomplished with the following, where rdisk0s3 is your windows partition (typically this would be either rdisk0s3 or rdisk0s4)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk0s4 bs=1m count=100
Another solution that worked for me is to specify an invalid filesystem type for the windows partition when using diskutil resizeVolume. This allocates the space, but the MBR doesn't flag it as FAT-32, so the Windows installer again offers to reformat it at install time.