Prolly gonna bite the bullet and go native install, but what to do to safeguard MBR

[Soldat]

I cannot figure out how to get OSX installed to my external USB2 drive through VMWare, so I am going to try and do it natively, but I have one qualm.

 

The image I got does not come with any howto vis-a-vis dual booting, and I am afraid of successfully installing OSX but in the process hosing my MBR or something so I can no longer boot my internal drive running my XP installation.

 

Do I need to install grub or something first?

[quixos]

with XP on the first partition, and an installation of osX on another partition of the same HD, you will be able by hitting F8 at boot, to choose your XP from the osX boot manager.

[Soldat]

with XP on the first partition, and an installation of osX on another partition of the same HD, you will be able by hitting F8 at boot, to choose your XP from the osX boot manager.

 

What if I have OSX on an external disk, will the same method work do you think?

[schippermaarten]

To safeguard your mbr, get a linux livecd/usbpendrive and boot from it. When booted type "sudo dd if='source drive/partition' of='destination drive/partition/filename' count=1". Replace source/destination drive/partition with values which match your configuration

[jdxxx]

You can use any Win XP installation CD to restore your MBR -- you do not need anything else. Boot the installation CD, select the Recovery Console, select restore/repair MBR. Done. Reboot into Windows. (I have been there and done it a few times on this one....). Google on it for details

 

Easiest way to dual/triple boot is to use Acronis Disk Director. It does partitioning and sets up an excellent OS Selector at boot. Also creates a recovery disk to get back to your XP partition if something goes wrong. Just install OSX to a primary partition, OS Selector will discover the install, and add it to the boot list.

 

I have a triple boot with Acronis OS selector: XP, OSX 10.4.3, OSX 10.4.5.