Howto: Add retail Leopard to an existing Windows installation

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If you have access to a working installation of Mac OS (either on a real Mac or on a Hackintosh, it doesn't matter for the following purposes), there is a very straightforward way to add OS X, using a retail DVD, to an additional partition on a disk already containing windows.

 

In my case, what I actually did was migrate my existing vista installation to a larger disk to which I had added an OS 10.5.6 partition. But the same method can be used to simply add a new OS X partition without upgrading to a larger disk, provided one has enough disk space. Using vista's boot manager, I can now dual-boot my old vista installation alongside a very vanilla Mac OS 10.5.6 (only AppleSMBIOS.kext was replaced). In particular,

 

- I did not have to waste time reinstalling windows from scratch! (big plus)

 

- I did not have to edit any config files by hand.

 

- In a simple way, I was able to solve the following conundrum (see also step 4(a) below). I wanted to use Acronis True Image to migrate my existing vista installation. However, Acronis can only restore to MBR disks, whereas retail OS X can only be installed to GUID disks, and it is not possible (afaik) to switch a disk from GUID to MBR, or vice versa, without destructive repartitioning!

 

On the down side, I did have to use two external USB drives and a 16 GB USB key, though perhaps one can manage with less hardware.

 

Anyway, here's what I did; for convenience, let me refer to the external USB drives as drive A (for auxiliary backup purposes) and drive B (the one that I ultimately used for the final installation):

 

0. On the USB key, I installed OS X from a retail DVD. Since I had access to a mac, I did this by mounting the key to the mac, then formating it as GUID/Mac OS FS (journal) using Disk Utility, then installing OS X from the DVD in the normal way as explained elsewhere in the forums, then applied the 10.5.6 combo updater, and then finally added a few kext's for keyboard/mouse, sound, tablet functionality (in my case, for a ThinkPad X61 tablet) and replaced the vanilla AppleSMBIOS.kext and added dsmos.kext. Note: I did NOT at this stage install chameleon boot loader.

 

1. Backed up my vista partition to drive A (NTFS-formated) using Acronis True Image 2009. This is a commercial program, but a free fully-functional trial version can be downloaded directly from Acronis. Note: True Image cannot handle GUID disks, even if they only contain FAT/NTFS partitions.

 

2. Made two new partitions on drive B using Acronis: the first for vista (NTFS formated), the second one for OS X (FAT32 formated, temporarily).

 

3. Attached drive B to the working mac (as in step 0), and used Disk Utility to change the OS X designated partition from FAT32 to Mac OS FS (journaled). Note: If one has MacFuse and NTFS-3G, then step 2 seems superfluous; but, I had trouble using MacFuse to format NTFS, so I ended up having to use Acronis (just plain windows will also suffice) to do that, hence both steps 3 AND 2 were necessary.

 

4(a). This is the key step. Again using the working mac with drive B still mounted, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the OS X on the USB key (step 0) to the OS X partition on drive B; then to this partition I installed Chameleon 1.0.11.

 

4(. [Not strictly necessary] Attached drive B to my thinkpad and booted it up just to confirm that drive B could at least boot OS X. (It worked!)

 

5. Using Acronis, I restored my vista backup from drive A (step 1) to the NTFS partition on drive B.

 

6(a). Booted up windows on drive B. Although at this stage OS X was already on drive B, the vista boot manager did not yet see it. So, once I was in vista, I used EasyBCD (it is truly easy!) to add a Mac OS X entry to the vista boot manager.

 

6(. Restarted and confirmed that both vista and Mac OS appeared in the vista boot manager, and that both of them could be booted up.

 

Done.