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Triple Booth for newbie


polloarena
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Hi All, I am a long time Mac User and professional Windows Idiot: however I had to get a Windows system to use my still close to perfect Video Editing System (Originally a Mac Only Radius Product, became Digital Origin and did a Winows versions, then sold to Media 100 then sold to Diskreet who did the last upgrade for defunct MAC OS sys 9 and windows XP).

 

The Vaio VGN T is a great little machine, and as things are there is no Apple equivalent so I got it. I installed SuSe and everything works fully functional (screen rez and sound with some little help) as for the rest OSX bluetooth and most software works fine. I only need XP for two apps the Editing Soft and the a DV footage catalogue which goes with it. For the video I use quicktime and the video cat is a Java app so no compatyibility problems.

 

I'd like to make a triple Booth on this machine with SuSe Linux which I got to like and use on a regular basis, then an OSX partition for certain Mac stuff finally the Windows partition (only for my editing prog which run native in XP and it's still the best for me and my work now) as I need nothing else from the Windows side.

 

In the regular Mac Hardware pressing the proper key combination at both strap I can choose which partition I want to use: how can I get this with Suse?

 

Also I'd like to be able to see the different partitions as disks.

 

I made a FAT32 for Windows and it's readable by MAC and Suse has the hfs+options.

 

I get lost when I use windows ...

 

 

Any help in very simple terms would be great ..... I used the Mac too long and perhaps I got spoiled from it's ease of use ....

 

Ta from Taiwan

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Well you can definitely triple boot, that's what I'm doing now. You need grub (not LILO... not flexible enough) under SuSE. Add two entries in grub.conf for XP and OSX pointing to the correct partitions seen the grub way ( ie, your first parition of the first disk is (hd0,0) , the linux equivalent of /dev/hda1) and boot them via the chainloader +1 instruction. Pretty easy and works fine.

 

As for filesystems, you're going to get stuck from within XP. Here's what the current situation is:

 

- XP can only read/write to ntfs and fat32 natively. There are apparently utils out there to at least read hfs+, but other XP users can answer that. I can't be bothered as XP is of use only for Skype Video as far as I'm concerned. It's completely incapable of accessing modern linux filesystems (ext2 might work but that's crash prone).

 

- OSX can read/write hfs+ and read ntfs and fat32 (possibly write to fat32 too), as far as I can tell. Seems incapable of mounting any linux partitions.

 

- Linux can read/write hfs+ and fat32, and read ntfs (there's a hack out there called Captive to write ntfs, but it's true linux guru stuff, not for the faint hearted).

 

So your only answer if you want a swap partition between them all, is fat32. Which is going to be unreliable. Otherwise just let OSX and SuSE read from the NTFS partition...

 

As far as the order in which to install the computer, i'd do it like this:

 

1. Install SuSE and create at the installation stage these partitions:

 

/dev/hda1 type 7 ( ntfs )

/dev/hda2 type AF ( Darwin Boot ) make this partition active

/dev/hda3 type 82 ( linux swap )

/dev/hda5 type 83 (linux )

/dev/hda6 type 83 (linux) for your /home

 

2. configure grub

 

3. install XP

 

4. install OSX

 

you're done normally with this. I recommend partitionning from Linux only, as it's got the most flexible tools. OSX will kill all your partitions if you let loose DiskUtility on them, and NT's Computer Manager won't even acknowledge non MS partitions. Good luck !

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Hi, thanks for your reply, however I am still unable to get the 3 systems to work. I wiped out the disk and created the partitions as you suggested with the SuSe installer.

 

Installed XP

 

 

Installed MACOSX

 

 

SuSE vanished and all I get in either Windowze or MACOSX

 

 

what am I doing wrong?

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Hi, you want windows or osx first (doesnt matter) then install suse and use grub for the os selector. i always install windows first tho... and if you need to resize the windows partition use gparted, pm me if you need a link.

 

 

max

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