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Triple Boot XP/Vista/OSX Works nice...


oxidize
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Not sure if it's been done, but :) managed to get Triple Booting done with relative ease (WinXP, WinVista, OSX).

 

In case anyone wanted to try it out (done sucessfully on my MacBook Pro):

 

1] Use BootCamp to make the Drivers CD so you have it handy.

 

2] Upgrade the Firmware (of course).

 

3] Boot to OSX from a CD/DVD/External Drive, whatever can get you into diskutility and terminal. I use an external Firewire drive.

 

4] Create an ASR disk image of your Macintosh HD (for restore) - I find this is easiest. Use Disk Utility to create the image of the HDD, then make sure to Scan for Restore (in Disk Utility)

 

5] Create three partitions on the main HDD, based off MBRFormat:

 

sudo diskutil partitionDisk disk0 3 MBRFormat MS-DOS NTFS1 30G MS-DOS NTFS2 30G HFS+ HFS+ 40G

 

This will create 2 FAT32 partitions that will later be formated to NTFS to support XP/Vista and one HFS+ partition for OSX. No crazy GPT parititons that confuses Vista.

 

6] Restore the ASR image to the HFS+ parition:

 

sudo asr -source <drag ASR image you created here for path> -target <drag HFS+ volume here for path> -erase -noverify

 

Once finished, you'll be able to boot into OSX

 

7] Now, Restart and boot from the XP SP2 cd (note: no Boot Camp needed).

 

8] Install WinXP normally on the 1st FAT32 partition - format it to NTFS as well...

 

Once finished, you'll be able to dual boot into OSX/WinXP. In XP, install all the drivers as normal.

 

9] In WinXP, format the 2nd partition to NTFS. It'll most likely be the D:\.

 

10] Finally, while booted into Windows (it's faster) Insert the Vista DVD and start the instalation process ** or, as I did - simply use Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120% to mount the Vista ISO from a network location and start the install that way (nice and quick on a 1Gbps connection).

 

Anyway, doesn't matter how you do it, just start installing Vista, and choose the 2nd partition to install too.

 

When it's finished, you can then boot into any OS. When holding the option key during startup the mac boot manager just says Macintosh HD and Windows... when you select Windows the Vista Bootmanager loads and lets you choose between XP and Vista.

 

:D

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out of curiousity, why did you format your xp/vista to ntfs? had you used fat32, you could manage any problem (virus w/e) from within your mac 10 environment...

 

Maybe something I'm missing...?

 

the only reason I ask is because I went fat32, mounted it in OSX and backed up a copy of Windows directly onto an iPod... I've used it twice thus far

 

couple mins vs hour?

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I just prefer NTFS I suppose. At work I have to deal with a lot of large files and permissions so I wanted to make sure they all work properly. Plus I find running WinXP on the FAT32 file system slows a lot of stuff down. For the rare troubleshooting stuff I prefer using a LiveCD anyway...

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followed your guide exactly, didnt work for me. the vista installer always goes black about 75% through and hangs. itll boot after that, but only to safe mode. normal is too slow to be usable. i think it may not install the sata driver right, because in safe mode the hard disk isnt listed as sata. what do you guys think? ive been using the winbeta 5342. what are you guys using?

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yup, using an imac. and yes, ive tried getting rid of everything else. i guess im goning to have to install on my laptop and dd it over to an external,and dd it into my imac. cant figure out why the installer keeps going black for me, no matter how the partitions are. i will say this to your guide tho, the installer went the farthest it ever did for me.

 

o well, i guess nobody needs vista.

 

wait does vista need the dvd after the first part of the installer? because i only mounted the iso using daemons. maybe thats the problem....i just assumed it dumped the install files.

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Oxidize,

 

I have confirmed your original post on being able to triple boot not that I had any doubts. OS X 10.4.5, Windows XP SP2, and Vista 5342, All working good.

 

Also wanted to say thanks for your post, I am still new to OS X and I have a crappy OS X book that I am using for some referrences and it doesn't go through using the diskutil command.

 

It's nice to not have to use bootcamp for anything other than the driver CD. I wasn't to pleased initially with :D bootcamp when I found out it only wanted to work with the space within the Mac OS X partition. I wasn't happy to find out that the free space I left aside for Windows would be of no use.

 

In the course of getting a solid image and the partitions set up properly I had access to a pair of firewire drives and was very impressed with the speed at which the Core Duo performs the task of reinstalling, imaging and verifying of things.

 

I have also gained a better understanding of ASR and the importance of "scanning for restore".

 

Thanks again!

 

Rotorblade

 

PS>The Green face is to signify the exhausted feeling after spending a few days exhausting all other paritions methods to find the dos and the don'ts with multi-booting

 

----------------------------

No Guts, No Glory!

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Good to hear it's working for you :thumbsup_anim: . Never know with betas. I was actually surprised when Vista installed & booted for the first time!

 

And to nevermind.... nope Vista only needs the DVD during the initial phase which is damn friggin awesome I must say. It dumps the wmi image and the WinPE environment on the boot drive. So that's why you can initially do it in WindowsXP. Cuts the install time in half.

 

Did you try any of the repair features in the Vista setup? I've never gone into it but I hear you can repair the install etc? or do a 'safe-mode' install or something... May be something to look into.

 

Maybe this won't work on an iMac? Anyone want to try it to confirm.

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i dont really know what happens. i even got a new copy of the image this time. does your install ever go black? i noticed this time i get a message during saying, your install i taking longer than expected, but will finish shortly. i should add that when i tried using the dvd previously it only restarted once, this time it restarts trice, and rather than flickers black before going black, it simply goes black. cant figure it out. my imac is 100% standard expect that i put 2 gigs of ram in it.

 

o well, if youve got any ideas please let me know.

 

thanks.

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  • 2 weeks later...

So does this eliminate the efi partition? Is there any downsides to using this method? I am wanting to try it tonight on the macbook pro work got for me... Any advice before I start? I don't need vista but would be fun to play in it... Any way to shrink my used space on os x? It has like 25 gigs used already!

Thanks,

Isaac.S

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Yup, this eliminates all partitions except the 3 created (two NTFS and one HFS+). I haven't encountered any problems with this setup, been working pretty nice and fast.

 

I'm not really sure why Disk Utility states that the GUID partition scheme must be used for Intel Macs, because I've used both the MBR/APM formated drives and they both boot my MBP fine... Seems that Intel Macs are even less picky on how to boot... Any older Macs I've tried running OS X the OS has to be on an APM formated drive.

 

Also, I've been using this sweet program for creating the images rather than Disk Utility: http://www.bombich.com/software/netrestore.html Used to be called Carbon Copy Cloner I believe. Use it all the time at work.

 

Oh, and a side note. Vista Build 5365 didn't work on my MBP. Just BSOD on the loader. When I wrote these instructions I was using 5342.

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  • 2 weeks later...

OK I finally got time to play with this a little but for some reason this setup hates me. Every time I install XP it ends up erroring out after the initial blue setup screen portion reboots the machine. System says Disk error press any key to restart or something like that and the machine locks. The only thing I can imagine being an issue is that I am using different sized partitions (122GB NTFS, 10GB NTFS, 20GB HFS+).

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Weird...

 

Could be an MBR issue... I've ran into that problem a few times (usually when pushing an image via Ghost to the MBP). Usually its either a blank screen or 'Operating System Not Found' error though...

 

But after WinXP setup, if it gives you that error then locks. Try booting from the XP CD again. Then go into the recovery console. Once in there it should detect the OS... then get you to a command prompt. Type FIXMBR. Then reboot. Hopefully that helps.

 

You can also double check that the disk formated correctly by going into terminal and checking what fdisk has to say... Should say something like this:

 

Last login: Sat May 13 17:23:23 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
-bash: /sw/bin/init.sh: No such file or directory
w400-2222:~ dhdeeg$ sudo -s
Password:
w400-2222:~ root# fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
fdisk: could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0: No such file or directory
Enter 'help' for information
fdisk: 1> print
Disk: /dev/rdisk0	   geometry: 12161/255/63 [195371568 sectors]
Offset: 0	   Signature: 0xAA55
	 Starting	   Ending
#: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [	 start -	   size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*1: 07	0   1   1 - 1023  64  51 [		63 -   62914560] HPFS/QNX/AUX
2: 07 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [  62914635 -   62914560] HPFS/QNX/AUX
3: AF 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [ 125829207 -   69542361] HFS+		
4: 00	0   0   0 -	0   0   0 [		 0 -		  0] unused	  
fdisk: 1>

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  • 4 weeks later...

Ok I followed your instructions, first off, in terminal.. After I booted from OSX install disc, got into terminal I entered a command similar to "sudo diskutil partitionDisk disk0 3 MBRFormat MS-DOS NTFS1 30G MS-DOS NTFS2 30G HFS+ HFS+ 40G"..

 

Terminal didn't recognize the command. So I then proceeded to partition my HDD using Disk utility. I'm only working with an 80Gb so my Partitions are 30GB OSX/ 30GB Fat32 / 14.5GB Fat32.

 

Loaded OSX onto the first partition, rebooted with the Windows XP install disc holding down the "C" button after sound starts.. Booted into windows install, but it did not recognize the partitions I had created. It just showed up as one main hard drive with no partitions.

 

Did I do something that doesnt work here? Hit me back fellas.. Thanks!

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"sudo diskutil partitionDisk disk0 3 MBRFormat MS-DOS NTFS1 30G MS-DOS NTFS2 30G HFS+ HFS+ 40G"..

 

Terminal didn't recognize the command. So I then proceeded to partition my HDD using Disk utility. I'm only working with an 80Gb so my Partitions are 30GB OSX/ 30GB Fat32 / 14.5GB Fat32.

 

Loaded OSX onto the first partition, rebooted with the Windows XP install disc holding down the "C" button after sound starts.. Booted into windows install, but it did not recognize the partitions I had created. It just showed up as one main hard drive with no partitions.

 

Did I do something that doesnt work here? Hit me back fellas.. Thanks!

 

First of all you should not have proceeded if the command didn't work. You definitely fat fingered something. I think it took me a few tries in order to get that down. By the looks of what you quoted, that looks right, however I followed the original posted instructions and had 100% success with partitioning with the commandline "diskutil". I too had a 80 in my MBP and has small partitions.

 

Try the command again when you get to that point and then if it doesn't work for testing purposes try smaller partitions like 20 20 and 20 just to see if you can get it to work. You can always repartition. I all in all probably spent 40 hours over the course of a week and a half learning about the do's and don'ts with booting the Mactel book pro. I started to document my work but it became exhausting and probably after 20 different configurations I was finally happy. I ended up using two firewire drives so I didnt have to keep toasting the internal install.

 

 

 

Ever thought about not stopping at 3 partitions and shooting for 4 and run linux too :dev: You could even virtualize windows XP or Vista with a product from www.parallels.com or VMware. Its fun!

 

 

 

Good Luck. :blink:

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The reason Windows doesn't recognize the partitions is that by default Disk Utility/diskutil will partition the drive using the GUID partition scheme. This creates the 'EFI' partition and why everything screws up.

 

Althought it might work now... Maybe the newer vista builds will recognize the EFI? haven't checked... anyway...

 

If you want to do it through Disk Utility you should be able to... but just make sure to click 'Options' and select the 'Master Boot Record' partition scheme. GUID and Apple Partition Map no worky...

 

Use this command, exactly, mind the capitals and such.

 

sudo diskutil partitionDisk disk0 3 MBRFormat MS-DOS NTFS1 15G MS-DOS NTFS2 30G HFS+ HFS+ 35G

 

And how did terminal not recognize it? What was the error?

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Not sure if it's been done, but :) managed to get Triple Booting done with relative ease (WinXP, WinVista, OSX).

 

In case anyone wanted to try it out (done sucessfully on my MacBook Pro):

 

1] Use BootCamp to make the Drivers CD so you have it handy.

 

2] Upgrade the Firmware (of course).

 

3] Boot to OSX from a CD/DVD/External Drive, whatever can get you into diskutility and terminal. I use an external Firewire drive.

 

4] Create an ASR disk image of your Macintosh HD (for restore) - I find this is easiest. Use Disk Utility to create the image of the HDD, then make sure to Scan for Restore (in Disk Utility)

 

5] Create three partitions on the main HDD, based off MBRFormat:

 

sudo diskutil partitionDisk disk0 3 MBRFormat MS-DOS NTFS1 30G MS-DOS NTFS2 30G HFS+ HFS+ 40G

 

This will create 2 FAT32 partitions that will later be formated to NTFS to support XP/Vista and one HFS+ partition for OSX. No crazy GPT parititons that confuses Vista.

 

6] Restore the ASR image to the HFS+ parition:

 

sudo asr -source <drag ASR image you created here for path> -target <drag HFS+ volume here for path> -erase -noverify

 

Once finished, you'll be able to boot into OSX

 

7] Now, Restart and boot from the XP SP2 cd (note: no Boot Camp needed).

 

8] Install WinXP normally on the 1st FAT32 partition - format it to NTFS as well...

 

Once finished, you'll be able to dual boot into OSX/WinXP. In XP, install all the drivers as normal.

 

9] In WinXP, format the 2nd partition to NTFS. It'll most likely be the D:\.

 

10] Finally, while booted into Windows (it's faster) Insert the Vista DVD and start the instalation process ** or, as I did - simply use Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120% to mount the Vista ISO from a network location and start the install that way (nice and quick on a 1Gbps connection).

 

Anyway, doesn't matter how you do it, just start installing Vista, and choose the 2nd partition to install too.

 

When it's finished, you can then boot into any OS. When holding the option key during startup the mac boot manager just says Macintosh HD and Windows... when you select Windows the Vista Bootmanager loads and lets you choose between XP and Vista.

 

:)

 

Hello

I might not know much about macs so bear with me. Why is it necessary to make an ASR image ? Mine is a day old so is it necessary for me to backup if i do not have any data so far ?

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I've got a question... How well does activation work in XP? (on a mac, that is)

 

Do you mean how successfully does it generate a hardware ID composed of the six or seven unique items (logic board, CPU, video card, hard drive serial, etc)?

 

I don't know for certain, but I think it is identical to other PCs. The Intel Macs effectively behave just as a regular PC as far as Windows is concerned. The installation procedures such as this one are really just about partitioning the drive in a manner that both Mac OS X and Windows are happy with.

 

I don't think using an Intel Mac would change the way activation works. Anyway, I had no trouble activating my genuine OEM XP Pro on a MacBook.

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  • 1 year later...

Helloa all - I tried this on a Jun 2007 MBP and it worked flawlessly...right up until I wanted to install Leopard over Tiger. Now I want to take the next step and do a Leopard, XP (still find Vista perplexing), and Ubuntu triple boot. In concept it seems this procedure would work, but I know next to nothing about Macs. I've tried a bunch of other triple booting procedure and no dice. Any thoughts or suggestions? I'm thinking imaging and dropping the Leopard image back onto a MBR-friendly HD is the key...

 

Thanks in advance

g-

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Awesome! Got this to work for me. Vista seemed to time-out on a couple processes while installing. Like right before the end when it was "checking the computer's performance", but upon manual reboot it worked fine.

 

However, without holding option at boot, it takes a while for it to find and boot the Mac OS by default. Maybe because the two Windows partitions are first?

 

Also, can I install rEFIt and use it to select? I'm not sure if it'll mess up the boot record. (I know nothing about boot stuff). If I install rEFIt will I be able to choose between the two Windows partitions?

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  • 1 month later...

Have anyone got a BootitNG program and cracks..i am using triple boot xp,mandriva and osx(intelBased) and using BootitNG as a boot manager(all in the single 160 hd)..but now i am using trial version bootitNG 1.82 and it just can be used for 30 days...by the way have anyone got any another boot manager...i heard about `refit'?..

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