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Want to triple boot Ubunutu, XP, and Leopard


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I've tried multiple methods of achieving my desired goal of having all three OSes on my laptop. Ideally, I want to have my first partition be Ubuntu, my second partition be Windows XP, and my third partition be OSX Leopard, and I want to be handling booting with GRUB. Right now, I have my desktop computer set up as my first partition (it was on the computer before I switched to Linux) and my second partition contains Ubuntu, and thanks to GRUB Ubuntu is the default OS it boots. I have a blank space of 10GB which I've been attempting to use to install OSX on, but so far I've had no success. I'm trying to figure out which filesystem format I need to use. I know that NTFS will not work with OSX, and I've attempted formatting to EXT2, EXT3 with the GParted on the Ubuntu live CD.

 

I recently became fed up with Windows XP on my laptop after I got the SAME virus twice and my system got Ninja kicked in the balls. My Toshiba Satellite began life as a Vista Home Premium machine, and getting all the hardware drivers in order to rollback to XP has been a pain in the ass, only to have it all go to {censored} when I encountered a virus that my expensive antivirus software did nothing against. Thank God IBM and Dell have used the same components I've got on my Toshiba Laptop on their XP machines. And then there was the whole issue of needing to make a custom WinXP install disc with the SATA drivers slipstreamed in. I formatted the entire HD and did a clean install of Ubuntu. I changed my mind and then decided to create a partitioned space on the drive for installing XP, and hopefully OSX but no luck so far, and if I install windows after ubuntu, the XP boot loader overrides GRUB and I can't boot into Ubuntu. I know that it's just a matter of modifying the boot.ini file, but doing so can cause system instability. Right now I have XP running in Virtualbox in Ubuntu and it works great for what I use it for web cam with MSN which is currently not supported in Linux. It would be nice to be able to play my windows games at full speed though, Cedega just doesn't cut it and compatibility is really hit or miss. I also had a copy of OSX Tiger running in VMware Player but performance was AWFUL and almost everything was broken like ethernet (but wifi worked... go figure) USB, Firewire, DVD, etc. the intel graphics acceleration was supported but the emulation was so slow it was useless for anything other than saying "I run Hackintosh on my Linux Box". And I'm actually trying to achieve functionality here.

 

So after trying several times to install OSX with iDeneb 10.5.5 v. 1.3 I think I may have finally made some headway (on my Desktop computer anyway). I had to boot up my Ubuntu install disk and create a new partition using GParted. I used Ext2 because I thought that's what format Mac uses. Then when I booted up the OSX install disk, I had no options available for where to install OSX. I brought up the disk utility and tried to edit the partition that way, but I kept on getting an error saying the disk could not be mounted, and the first aid functions were greyed out. But I saw that FAT32 was the default format option. So from there I exited out of the OSX disc and booted up my WinXP install disc and used the partition editor to erase the partition and format it as FAT32. Then I rebooted the OSX install disc and this time it recognized the disc, but was still unable to mount it. I was able to run First Aid on the partition, and then after reformatting AGAIN, this time using Disk Utility and changing the format to Mac Extended, I was finally able to mount the partition. I am currently installing as I'm typing this. It seems to be working fine and it says it's got an hour and 20 minutes left. Crossing my fingers and toes now... If I do manage to get it installed on there, then I will probably have to sort out the issues with boot selection.

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Wow that is quite a story!!

 

Well if you need any help, I have that setup on my desktop computer and I am using GRUB as my boot loader. I personally like using the Leo4All install for OSX and you can set up your GRUB again using the Ubuntu LiveCD.

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any input would be welcome at this point Shavex. I've successfully nuked both of my computers. My laptop is able to boot into Ubuntu, but I haven't successfully been able to boot into OSX yet once. Windows XP is also MIA right now, which is surprising because I've had no problems dual booting XP and Ubuntu for months. I wasn't even able to boot in OSX after doing a clean install with nothing else on the computer. I formatted my entire disk using Disk Utility and set up three equal sized partitions named "MACOSX", "WINXP", and "UBUNTU". After installing OSX using iDeneb 10.5.5 v1.3 I would start my computer and recieve a "no system disk error. press any key to reboot". Then after in stalling XP I recieved a similar error message, but if I recall correctly it just said "System error" and it would fail to load. Then after installing Ubuntu, I'm able to access the files in any of my partitions, but I"m only able to boot into Ubuntu. I'm going to try tweaking the GRUB menu.lst. If you can tell me anything else about what I'm doing wrong I'd be very appreciative.

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Well this is how I went about installing my 3 OS's.

 

1) I installed Windows, Mac, then Ubuntu, that way Ubuntu wrote the GRUB bootloader and at least recognized Windows and added it to the menu, I just had to add the Mac option later.

 

2) I used Leo4All and I don't know anything about iDeneb but make sure that you have the right patches applied for your hardware

 

You should be good after that!

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