Hypothetical triple boot XP, Vista ,OS 10.5.1

[acdcfan]

Hi all

This is my first post in search for answers

 

If I was going to ask for any help in here regarding above hypothetical subject, would I be breaking forum rules? I read forum rules and terms but it did not mentioned anything....

 

 

Hypothetically I have dual boot machine, XP and Vista on two separate SATA II hard drives. I am, hypothetically speaking, going to slot in 3rd 500Gb hard drive to install Mac OS 10.5.1. So far, hypothetically speaking, I managed to find instructions on how to install Kalyway on separate partition on the same hard drive but nothing on separate hard drive.

I am being paranoid of destroying boot loader, but I can not tell for certain which boot loader I am using when booting into Vista and which boot loader when booting into XP or they are two totally different ones. Basically when I turn my machine on, after a few seconds I get promoted to choose which OS I want to go to. That's what I want to get if I was, hypothetically speaking, going to install Mac OS 10.5.1.

 

What are your thoughts on disconnecting 2 hard drives with XP and Vista, installing OS X, reconnecting hard drives back and then what? What would happen then?Mind you I have EasyBCD installed on both hard drives

 

So far I have installed SATA controller and new hard drive. Both are seen in device manager and disk management. I have left new hard drive unformatted for the time being. It did my head in for about 2 hours. After initial hardware install I couldn't see hard drive in BIOS or any of disk management. Searched high and low to find out the cause but it turned out I didn't plugged the controller properly. How silly.....All is good

 

I intend on using EasyBCD and in my search I found this tutorial http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Mac+OS+X where it states following

"" Once OS X has finished installing, the Darwin bootloader should load up OS X for the first time. It should give you an "Other" option to boot into Windows Vista."

Is above statement correct? If it is, then it is smooth sailing al the way.... It goes on further by saying repair Vistas boot loader which makes sense but what is happening to Darwin bootloader? Does it, by repairing it, include an option to boot into OSX from Vistas bootlaoder or......?. To me it seems it does...

 

 

Any help would be appreciated....

 

Thank you

[acdcfan]

Anyone please.....

[(MoC)]

The procedure would be the same for any bootloader. The way chain0 works is that it loads a specific partition in this form: (drive, partition). So disk0s1 means disk 0 sector one. you need to tell us which is your primary drive (look in your BIOS) so we could tell you what to do. Make the OS X disk primary so you can manage all the drives via chain0 and not have to mess with either Vista or XP's bootloader.

 

~MoC

[acdcfan]

The procedure would be the same for any bootloader. The way chain0 works is that it loads a specific partition in this form: (drive, partition). So disk0s1 means disk 0 sector one. you need to tell us which is your primary drive (look in your BIOS) so we could tell you what to do. Make the OS X disk primary so you can manage all the drives via chain0 and not have to mess with either Vista or XP's bootloader.

 

~MoC

 

 

I will look into it tonight and post a result. From memory I think it is Xp drive becasue it went in first.... And even if Vistas disk management is showing up as disk0...

 

regards

asdcfan

[bandit373]

First post so if I mess up please let me know

 

You can triple boot Mac XP and Vista. I am doing it as we speak. Lookup a product called BootitNG. It is not free but it works great and keeps all the OS partitions seperate and hidden from each other, if you wish. There is a know issue with booting an XP and Vista install and having the restore points overwritten. Just hide the Vista partition from XP and visa versa and no problem. Cheers.

[acdcfan]

First post so if I mess up please let me know

 

You can triple boot Mac XP and Vista. I am doing it as we speak. Lookup a product called BootitNG. It is not free but it works great and keeps all the OS partitions seperate and hidden from each other, if you wish. There is a know issue with booting an XP and Vista install and having the restore points overwritten. Just hide the Vista partition from XP and visa versa and no problem. Cheers.

 

 

My Dual boot Xp and vista is working fine....

Cna you please post a link for BootitNG,,,

 

thanks

 

First post so if I mess up please let me know

 

You can triple boot Mac XP and Vista. I am doing it as we speak. Lookup a product called BootitNG. It is not free but it works great and keeps all the OS partitions seperate and hidden from each other, if you wish. There is a know issue with booting an XP and Vista install and having the restore points overwritten. Just hide the Vista partition from XP and visa versa and no problem. Cheers.

 

 

How did you get yours to work?

Do I install BootitNg on both of my hard drives, then istall Mac Os and let bootit do its job?

 

Please advice

Thanks

 

regards

acdcfan

 

The procedure would be the same for any bootloader. The way chain0 works is that it loads a specific partition in this form: (drive, partition). So disk0s1 means disk 0 sector one. you need to tell us which is your primary drive (look in your BIOS) so we could tell you what to do. Make the OS X disk primary so you can manage all the drives via chain0 and not have to mess with either Vista or XP's bootloader.

 

~MoC

 

It is definiatley XP drive..... boot drive.

[nyrol]

All you have to do is install your Mac OSX onto the new hard drive, and in your BIOS select which hard drive to boot from. It will then load the bootsector of the hard drive that you selected in the BIOS, and then you can configure it accordingly. You can set the vista drive as the boot drive, and then use easyBCD to configure everything for you. Hope this helps.

[acdcfan]

All you have to do is install your Mac OSX onto the new hard drive, and in your BIOS select which hard drive to boot from. It will then load the bootsector of the hard drive that you selected in the BIOS, and then you can configure it accordingly. You can set the vista drive as the boot drive, and then use easyBCD to configure everything for you. Hope this helps.

 

Nyrol,

Yes it does and after speaking to few people at work and other forums this is, I believe, the safest method....

 

 

Unplug my two drives and boot of a disk and install it on only one seen as the 3rd hard drive.....I have written my boot sequence as it is now....

Install Kalyway 10.5.1 , and let computer reboot until everything is configure in Mac.... Shut my computer down , and reconnect original hard drives and start the rig.

 

Go back to BIOS and set the boot sequence to original one and boot into Vista. After booting into it use Easy BCD to configure the bootloader by adding Mac OS as another OS....

My current boot sequence is

 

1 SATA: 3M -Samsung

2 SATA: 4M -Samsung

3 HL-DT-ST-DV

As it currently stands I can not clearly see my 3rd hdd in my BIOS, but if I press enter against any of my boot entries ( as in select that entry, press enter and list of devices comes up) I am able to see 3rd hdd

 

Will post result after I gather my courage this coming weekend.... I know some will call me pussy but I prefer to be safe than sorry.

 

Regards

acdcfan

[nyrol]

I have gotten xp, vista, ubuntu, and mac os x to work simultaneously on one hard drive with a difficult laptop. Very very difficult laptop. I wish I had more than one hard drive to do such a thing. Even if you keep your other hard drives connected, the installation should not touch the other hard drives. To the mac os, those other hard drives are just some random ntfs hard drives. I have not tried the way you are going to, but it will either not recognize the hard drives as anything more than slaves, or it will notice that there are operating systems on there and just add them to the darwin bootloader. It's really safe to triple boot when you have 3 hard drives, so you can just install whenever you feel like it without any worry.

[acdcfan]

I have gotten xp, vista, ubuntu, and mac os x to work simultaneously on one hard drive with a difficult laptop. Very very difficult laptop. I wish I had more than one hard drive to do such a thing. Even if you keep your other hard drives connected, the installation should not touch the other hard drives. To the mac os, those other hard drives are just some random ntfs hard drives. I have not tried the way you are going to, but it will either not recognize the hard drives as anything more than slaves, or it will notice that there are operating systems on there and just add them to the darwin bootloader. It's really safe to triple boot when you have 3 hard drives, so you can just install whenever you feel like it without any worry.

 

 

I am not worried about hard drives, I am paranoid of corrupting boot loader as I don't know anything about command prompt. EVrything I read so far, has had corrupted boot loade which needed fixing with chain0 and the Vistas disk to repair the boot sequence.

This way I don' thave to be worried about corruption or anything becasue it'll look as if there are no hard drives at all.

Maybe becasue you have Ubuntu installed, and grub boot loade, it was easier for you to triple boot.

 

Are you saying that Darwin boot loader shoudl detect other OS and allow you to boot into, or boot iot their boot loader?

I will be using Kalyway 10.5.1, do you think everything should be fine... If not where can I get instruction for chain0?

 

Edit

I am going to install Ubuntu on part of my 3rd hard drive on about 65gb partition, 400gb left for Mac, and use GRUB boot loader when I install Kalyway... It seem it is going to become quadruple boot instead of triple

Good idea or not?

[nyrol]

I use the vista bootloader with easybcd. I had installed vista last in my quad boot so it overwrote the bootsector of the hard drive. When you install an operating system on a hard drive, it installs its own bootloader into the bootsector of that hard drive by default. With 3 separate hard drives, you will have 3 bootsectors with their own bootloaders. This way, if you wanted to, you could use the bios to be your bootloader which would be tedious, but technically possible. There is no need to install ubuntu for this to work, and you could always install grub on its own if you wanted to use grub instead of the vista bootloader. I have mine setup in an annoying way actually where the vista bootloader just loads grub when I want to boot into ubuntu, and load up darwin for when I want to boot into Mac. Sure, that's the default way, but I haven't configured it yet.

[raulb]

Have been doing this for ages. Don't worry about bootloader, you can corrupt and rewrite it so doesn't matter much. What matters is you know how to recover from a situation where you pc is not booting to any OS. For this either you need the Vista/XP boot disk or a bootable rescue disk created with BartPE/VistaPE - These are like live XP/Vista systems booted from DVD's to rescue your system. So incase bootloader is an issue its a simple matter of booting off the dvd and rewriting it.

 

EasyBCD is the way to go, that's what I use to boot XP, Vista, Ubuntu, and OSX on 2 separate drives. I chucked Vista recently but kept the Vista bootloader as that is easier to manage with EasyBCD. I have 4 OSs on Disk 1 and a test copy of OSX Leopard on Disk 2. The only bootloader I have is the Vista bootloader on Disk one and EasyBCD which I use to boot Vista, XP, Ubuntu and OSX - 2 copies on either disk. The Vista bootloader boots Vista or XP, or hands off to Neogrub which is configured by easyBCD and is a file rather than a bootloader on XP partition that boots Ubuntu or either partition/disk of OSX via the Netkas pc-efi boot file. It's simple and robust compared to writing multiple bootloaders or installing grub etc on MBR.

 

Here's a explanation for MBR and XP/Vista bootloaders and how things work and how they go wrong by yours truly available at easybcd site. http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?...;highlight=raul