Question regarding the mechanics of installation and dual booting...

[sev1972]

Hi all, I've re-posted this here as I feel perhaps the Leopard installation forum was the wrong place to post.

 

I'm new to the OSx86 scene, having been a mac user for over 15 years before making the leap to windows out of necessity. I'm looking to build a hackintosh and have been reading intently to many threads, having bought a copy of leopard. I'm still quite confused and it's probably a case of cant see the wood for the trees. So now, I thought i'd take a different tack. I'm looking to expand my knowledge of the mechanics of installing OS X onto pc hardware and i'm starting to peice more of the whys behind the hows together so to speak.

 

I've read all the sticky guides and I notice that one thing is common amongst all of them, and that is that they all begin with a distro of some kind.

 

I'd like to ask, why is this necessary? Is begining with a distro easier than just diving in using the boot 123 method shown in the fox video on youtube, and a purchased retail CD? (I have now downloaded iAtkos just in case).

 

I have installed the correct asus bios, and flashed the firmware on my graphic card all thanks to this forum, but tried an install once and didn't succeed on the first attempt.

 

So I now have a boot 123 cd, a genuine leopard retail cd, and a spare sata drive formerly of my windows raid set. The bios is set to AHCI, and the optical drive is sata, bought specially for this.

 

 

I've reinstalled windows 7 on one drive, and totally wiped the second drive. So this is where i'm at.

 

Now before I do anything else, I'm going to get a lot more clued up!

 

I've also downloaded Chameleon 2.1, but I wonder if this is at all necessary?

 

I don't know if there is anything similar, but In OS X there was a control panel item 'startup disk' where you could select an OS to boot from - I used to use it for booting between OS X and OS9, is there such a thing now? I have an apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse, so the bootloader screen selection option, isn't if you know what I mean, unless of course I want to buy a separate plug in thing (and nobody makes just a usb arrow and return key pad! lol)

 

Anyway sorry to ramble on. When I finally get round to it, I'll start a thread at the same time in the Leopard install forum, and post pictures / issues up in realtime.

 

 

Many thanks in advance.

[Firestorm88]

I used retail install + 2 HDDs to dual boot. I think installing Windows 7 last might be best. I installed it first, then did the BIOS changes and installed Mac OS but Windows was corrupt when I went back to it and had to install again. Anyway, here are the steps I'd take:

 

1. Unplug Windows 7 HDD, keep Mac HDD plugged in

2. Install Mac OS X as normal. Finish Installation. Install Chameleon 2.0 RC2

3. Check to see if it's working correctly

4. Unplug Mac HDD, plug in Windows HDD

5. Install Windows 7 as normal

6. Plug in both HDDs

7. Boot up, if it goes straight to Windows you have the wrong HDD set to boot from first. Enter the BIOS and set the Mac HDD to boot up first as that's where Chameleon is located.

 

That's all.

 

The reason you have one HDD in at a time is because apparently both Windows 7 and OS X install some garbage data to both HDDs during installation which messes the other up.