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This may be the stupidest question in the world, and I apologize in advance if it is, but I haven't been able to find anything on this front just yet. I have two hard drives, one of which is basically empty. If I clear that one off, could I install OS X on that drive instead of creating a partition for it? I want to be able to boot to either Windows XP or OS X (another thing I'm unsure about how to do, at the moment) but my first concern is about whether or not I'm going to need to create a partition, at all.

 

Anyone have any thoughts?

  • 6 months later...

The hard drive needs an MBR on it. Best way to do that is to format it as FAT32 using any available utility except Windows itself since Windows won't format more that 32 GB.

 

When formatted as FATe32, there will be a tiny partition for the boot sectors and a big empty partition. Start your install DVD and go to Disk Utility in the Utilities menu. On the left, select the partition shown below the hard drive icon. Erase that as MacOS Extended and quit Disk Utility. Finish the installation.

There are plenty of utilities to allow you to get the drive ready for OSX86.

sfdisk or a hirens boot cd is a useful tool to add to you arsenal.

You need to set the drive to Primary and make sure the partiton is active.

you should then see the partition in diskutil when you run the install DVD.

select erase disk, Name it and make sure it is "Journaled"

 

Once installed if you have a dual boot system you will need to be able to select the drive to boot osx.

you can either

1. use a boot selector like Acronis

2. Select the OSX drive from the bios

3. IF your Motherboard allows you to select the boot drive (I hit escape on my gigabyte) it will pop up a menu allowing you to select which drive to boot from.

Hope this helps let us know if you have probs or success.

Good luck.

:)

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