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Dual booting Lion and Win 7 on same drive (Very easy)


ladiciuus
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Hello All, I just wanted to share with how easy it was to dual boot Lion GM and Windows 7. This is by far the easiest method of dual booting, it's not even funny. I am no expert by any means and i managed to pull this off in 30 minutes. This method would definitely work on Snow Leopard as well. I use this to dual boot on my laptop on the same hard drive.

 

1. This guide assumes that you have a working Lion install. Look at MaLd0n's method at http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=256729

 

Also, you will need to have the chameleon bootloader installed on the Lion partition of the drive that you want to set up Windows on.

 

So if you haven't installed lion yet, go ahead and do it.

 

2. In your lion install go to Disk Utility. Select your hard drive and go to the partitions tab. Make a new partition and adjust the size to your liking. Format it as FAT (that is if you want to install it on the same hard drive).

 

Done on the Lion side. Again you can replace Lion with Snow Leopard.

 

3. Insert your Windows 7 dvd and boot from it.

 

4. After it boots go ahead and click on Repair your computer. Select TOOLS etc (not the restore option).

 

5. Select command prompt and type the following:

 

a. diskpart (hit enter)

b. Select disk 0 (hit enter) (or the disk number you installing to - it will be 0 if you installing on the same drive as your mac os x)

c. list partition (hit enter) this will show you all the partitions on that disk. Find the one you formatted as FAT. You should guess by the size. Make sure it is the right one and note down the number.

d. Select partition x (where x is the number you noted in step c) (hit enter)

e. active (hit enter)

 

6. Close the command prompt window and close the tools window. Resume your Windows installation. Make sure you say custom install (advanced) and when it is asking you where you want to install, select your partition (make sure it is the right one) and format it as NTFS. I forget the exact names but something like you click on the partition and say disk options and you say format. NTFS will be the option. I'm pretty sure you will be fine with installing Windows if you can install Mac OS X on your pc.

 

7. Great Windows 7 is now installed. Reboot - yes you won't have chameleon anymore, because Windows overwrote the boot partition, but hey that's fine don't worry.

 

8. When you are rebooting in step 7, make sure you put your USB stick with chameleon on it and boot from it. (for Snow Leopard, this could be [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] or whatever cd loader you want to use).

 

9. Select your Lion install and boot into it.

 

10. Reinstall chameleon boot loader to your lion partition.

 

All done! when you reboot, you will see both your Lion and Windows disks and you can boot into either one. Without the need for any loaders. The first time you boot Windows, you might get the error saying Windows did not shut down properly or whatever, make sure you say "START Windows Normally" don't launch any repair options.

 

How easy was that?

 

You can install MacDrive on the windows side and Paragon NTFS on your Mac side for access to all drives no matter where you are.

 

Also if you do not have MacDrive on Windows side, NEVER EVER go to the windows disk management side and try to reformat or manage partitions - that will screw up ALL drives, trust me I know... MacDrive will actually stop you from doing that.

 

I hope that this helps.

 

Thanks for reading.

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So I was really hoping that this would work for me but I am still getting the same error code that I was before when trying to install win7 on a drive that already has lion installed (0x80300024). I was not able to get it to run diskpart off of the win7 disk cuz I kept getting a message that "this version of system recovery options is not compatible with the version of windows you are trying to repair" so I used a copy of Ultimate Boot CD to boot to xp and run the commands on the drive. If you have any other Ideas to get this to work it would be greatly appreciated. I really dont want to have to wipe the lion install out to get windows to boot off of the same drive...

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So I was really hoping that this would work for me but I am still getting the same error code that I was before when trying to install win7 on a drive that already has lion installed (0x80300024). I was not able to get it to run diskpart off of the win7 disk cuz I kept getting a message that "this version of system recovery options is not compatible with the version of windows you are trying to repair" so I used a copy of Ultimate Boot CD to boot to xp and run the commands on the drive. If you have any other Ideas to get this to work it would be greatly appreciated. I really dont want to have to wipe the lion install out to get windows to boot off of the same drive...

 

Do you have chameleon installed on your Lion partition? or are you booting Lion from your chameleon USB drive?

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So I was really hoping that this would work for me but I am still getting the same error code that I was before when trying to install win7 on a drive that already has lion installed (0x80300024). I was not able to get it to run diskpart off of the win7 disk cuz I kept getting a message that "this version of system recovery options is not compatible with the version of windows you are trying to repair" so I used a copy of Ultimate Boot CD to boot to xp and run the commands on the drive. If you have any other Ideas to get this to work it would be greatly appreciated. I really dont want to have to wipe the lion install out to get windows to boot off of the same drive...

 

 

Format the disk with the Windows 7 install DVD. Partition the hard drive. Install Windows 7. Then look at one of the guides that shows you how to install Lion on a MBR volume. I used nawcom's guide. Make the disk bootable with Chameleon. When you boot Chameleon will have a boot menu and you can choose Windows 7 or OS X depending on how you feel that day. That's it. Pretty simple. ;)

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Do you have chameleon installed on your Lion partition? or are you booting Lion from your chameleon USB drive?

So I actually dont have a bootloader installed on this particular hard drive, I boot off another hard drive that has snowleopard installed.

 

Format the disk with the Windows 7 install DVD. Partition the hard drive. Install Windows 7. Then look at one of the guides that shows you how to install Lion on a MBR volume. I used nawcom's guide. Make the disk bootable with Chameleon. When you boot Chameleon will have a boot menu and you can choose Windows 7 or OS X depending on how you feel that day. That's it. Pretty simple. ;)

Yea I get that it is possible to install it this way and if I would of known before I did all the work to get lion to work with my system I would of done it this way but what I have been looking for is a way to get win7 installed without destroying the existing 10.7 install.

 

Format the disk with the Windows 7 install DVD. Partition the hard drive. Install Windows 7. Then look at one of the guides that shows you how to install Lion on a MBR volume. I used nawcom's guide. Make the disk bootable with Chameleon. When you boot Chameleon will have a boot menu and you can choose Windows 7 or OS X depending on how you feel that day. That's it. Pretty simple. :)

Yea I get that it is possible to install it this way and if I would of known before I did all the work to get lion to work with my system I would of done it this way but what I have been looking for is a way to get win7 installed without destroying the existing 10.7 install.

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So I actually dont have a bootloader installed on this particular hard drive, I boot off another hard drive that has snowleopard installed.

 

I think that is your problem. Installing Chameleon on the Lion Drive will create the MBR for you. That was my set up when I did this with no problems at all. Try that.

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So I was really hoping that this would work for me but I am still getting the same error code that I was before when trying to install win7 on a drive that already has lion installed (0x80300024). I was not able to get it to run diskpart off of the win7 disk cuz I kept getting a message that "this version of system recovery options is not compatible with the version of windows you are trying to repair" so I used a copy of Ultimate Boot CD to boot to xp and run the commands on the drive. If you have any other Ideas to get this to work it would be greatly appreciated. I really dont want to have to wipe the lion install out to get windows to boot off of the same drive...

 

you only need the cmd prompt to run diskpart, after booting with the windows 7 disk wait until the mouse pointer appears and just hit the [shift] + [f10] keys combo to bring up the cmd prompt

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  • 4 weeks later...
So I was really hoping that this would work for me but I am still getting the same error code that I was before when trying to install win7 on a drive that already has lion installed (0x80300024). I was not able to get it to run diskpart off of the win7 disk cuz I kept getting a message that "this version of system recovery options is not compatible with the version of windows you are trying to repair" so I used a copy of Ultimate Boot CD to boot to xp and run the commands on the drive. If you have any other Ideas to get this to work it would be greatly appreciated. I really dont want to have to wipe the lion install out to get windows to boot off of the same drive...

You can press Shift+F10 when you use a Windows 7 DVD, and get a CMD window up.

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