Installing leopard on an extended MBR partition

[me999]

I have recently bought a laptop and dual booted Windows XP and Mandriva Linux. I attempted to stick Leopard on it but had to flash a modified bios to get it installing. Anyhow, I only had a 250GB HDD and wanted to switch Linux with Leopard. Also, I already had Windows set up as the primary parition and didnt was to restructure the partitions. The format of the SATA HDD was partitioned as follows:

 

MBR Partition Table

NTFS - 40GB - Windows

NTFS - 170GB - Storage

Free - 40GB - Free Space

 

Note: For any Windows users that want to install Leopard along side windows without touching Windows, you can use PartitionMagic to resize your NTFS partition without formatting it. It is best to free up at least 40GB if you want to use Leopard properly.

 

So now the partition were ready I wanted to stick Leopard on it. I formatted the last partition to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) via Disk Utility in the Leopard installer and installed iDeneb v1.3 (10.5.5) on the partition.

 

Now for the booting. The original bootloader from iDeneb could not boot Leopard from an extended partition using MBR. I tried sticking the Grub bootloader from Linux on it but had problems as I didnt want to give Linux any disk space and I had already partitioned the disk. I also tried installing other bootloaders such as Acronis and others but none of them worked. Also tried installing EFI v8 for MBR but it failed, it may have been a similar version that came with iDeneb.

 

Finally, I stuck the iAtkos 10.5.4 leopard install disc in and realised there is a different bootloader on that. There is also the option to ONLY install the bootloader from the customise screen. This enabled me to boot into Leopard and fortunately it also added all of the disc paritions to the bootloader so I could boot into Windows from the EFI bootloader iAtkos installed.

 

Hope this helps anyone else who doesn't want to mess up their current machine to install Leopard. Btw, Using Leopard as my primary OS now and loving it