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Triple Booting XP/OSX86/Ubuntu


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I have a 75 gig hard drive. I have installed XP on a 50 gig partition. The rest will be for OSX and Ubuntu. It isn't formatted yet, but I plan to make it a 12 for OSX, 8 for Ubuntu, and 5 for a FAT32 swap.

 

1. What order should I install the next two OS's in? Is there a good guide for triple booting?

 

2. What boot loader is eventually used? Can GRUB from Linux boot all three OS's? I'd like to accomplish installing all 3 without purchasing or installing something like Acronis or Partition Manager.

 

Any help?

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First, to have the best experience with Ubuntu, you need at least 7gig. Of course this doesn't include space for your virtual OS when/if you install vmware. You need at least 15gig for OS X if you don't demand any space for audio and video editing. Most apps are universal so they take up alot of space.

 

Now, I think the most practical way to install in order is, XP, OS X, and Linux, using xloader (OS X) to boot to the other OS. Remember that OS X will only recognize primary bootable partitions. So set Xp, Linux (/boot) and OS X ONLY as primary partitions.

 

If you wnat to use grub, you can install XP, OS X, Linux. Ubuntu will write to HD0, which is your first primary partiton. In this case it will be your Windows partition. Once Linux is installed, there is a chance that Linux will not autimatically recognize the other OS partitions. You can alway edit the menu.lst and add XP and OS X partitons to boot from.

 

Have fun :dev:

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  • 2 weeks later...

I recommend to use grub, it is really easy to setup, i have installed in this order: first mac os x, ubuntu, xp, in this partitions:

 

1. xp

2. mac os

3 linux

4 /home partition (Optional)

5 swap 1.5 gb

 

after installing ubuntu, modify the menu.lst files on /boot/grub adding title title mac os X

rootnoverify (hd0,1) -This is on my case, as i have MacOsX on 2nd partition-

makeactive

Chainloader +1

 

etc...

 

and of course, you can add xp, also...

look for grub in the installing forums..

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  • 4 weeks later...
I recommend to use grub, it is really easy to setup, i have installed in this order: first mac os x, ubuntu, xp, in this partitions:

 

1. xp

2. mac os

3 linux

4 /home partition (Optional)

5 swap 1.5 gb

 

after installing ubuntu, modify the menu.lst files on /boot/grub adding title title mac os X

rootnoverify (hd0,1) -This is on my case, as i have MacOsX on 2nd partition-

makeactive

Chainloader +1

 

 

etc...

 

and of course, you can add xp, also...

look for grub in the installing forums..

try chainloader +2 Chainloader should be non capital letters.

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Here's what I did:

-Boot OS X installer, make three partitions on the HD, first one free space, second one HFS+, third one free space.

-Install OS X on second partition

-Boot XP installer

-Install XP on first partition by having XP format it as NTFS (in hindsight, I should have done FAT32 so I could write to it from OS X)

-Boot Linux CD (I used Ubuntu 6.06)

-Use largest free space (ends up being final partition)

 

-Now boot to installed Linux OS, edit GRUB/LILO file (in my case, it was the /Boot/Grub/menu.lst file, I copied the entry for XP and changed the name from XP to OS X, and changed the root from (0,0) to (0,1))

 

The first time I tried booting OS X, it went to Windows instead. I added 'makedefault' to the OS X entry in the menu.lst file, and now it will boot any of the three OSs just fine!

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i add XP pro, i set up OS X using a logical partition then convert it to primary, then i set up ubuntu and edited menu.lst to add OS X in it :P

 

i now Have XP/OSX 10.4.7/Ubuntu and i'll soon add BeOS as i have a 4gig primary partition to use ^^

 

you don't really need an order to set everything up, you can install everything at any time, you just have to found how to fix things to get them work as you want :)

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