Advice for multi boot OSX/Win7/Linux after OSX Clone

[fenril06]

Hi everyone!

 

I read a lot on this forum before trying to install OS X on my laptop. I finally went on a external hard drive with a iPC 10.5.6, and it works hell great. Now I was thinking of cloning this installation on my internal hard drive in order not to plug in a external HDD everytime I want to boot Mac OS.

 

My internal hard drive has the following partition table:

Partition 1: boot - Win 7 - NTFS

Partition 2: Primary - HFS+

Partition 3: Logic - FAT32

Partition 4: Logic - Linux Swap

Partition 5: Logic- Kubuntu 9.04 - ext3

Partition 6: Primary - Data - NTFS

 

How you probably guessed i wanna install mac OSX on the HFS+ partition that I created on this purpose. Quite weird when i created it using disk utility it messed up totally my partition table and I had to use test disk to repair it. Anyway...

My questions and needs for advice would be:

 

- Should I clone my installation that works fine in my external hard drive to the partition 2 using Carbon Copy Cloner or superduper? Then should I install chameleon 2 on partition 2 to make it bootable? Is it not gonna mess with all my partitions again? Or should I just use windows 7 BCD to add an entry for mac os?

 

- Would it be easier to make a fresh install from the iPC disk on my internal hard drive? I would then loose all the tweaking i made on my external hard drive...

 

I was really going for the clone but I wanted to get some advices first. My big worry being Windows is on the first partition, so I don't really know the behaviour for the bootloader...

 

Thanks a lot!

[srs5694]

I'd try the clone procedure, for the reason you state: It'll keep your tweaks. It's also less likely to cause boot loader troubles.

 

In a multi-boot situation like you describe, you'll need at least two boot loaders. The primary boot loader resides in the MBR, and it directs the boot process to whatever other partition you select (or to a Linux kernel, if the boot loader is GRUB or LILO). The secondary boot loaders reside in the boot partitions (Windows, Mac OS X, and possibly Linux if the MBR doesn't hold GRUB or LILO). The least disruptive method of booting after you clone your OS X installation is to install the second-stage portion of your OS X boot loader (Chameleon, PC-EFI, whatever) in the OS X boot partition, but to leave your primary boot loader alone. That said, I've been unable to get GRUB to boot to a Chameleon second-stage boot loader; it just doesn't work for me. Maybe there's a specific configuration that would work, but I've not found it. Instead, I tell GRUB to boot the Chameleon first-stage boot loader (the boot0 file) from the Linux boot partition rather than from the MBR. This does work for me. Since you mentioned the Windows BCD, if you're using that, you might be able to do something similar, but I don't know enough about it to give you advice.

 

In sum, there are a lot of ways to configure those three OSes' boot loaders, and the options can be confusing. Sometimes one way will work but another won't. Plan to experiment.

[fenril06]

Thanks for your answer, it was quite interesting since i definitely had the problems you mentioned.

So here is what I did to make it work. Might help some people.

So I cloned the partition to my "inside" partition using superduper. Then installed chameleon bootloader on my OSX partition. When I tried to boot it failed...Of course...

Using my external hard drive and its bootloader i was able to chain to all my 3 systems.

The partition table looked alright but still i rewrote it using test disk just to be sure.

Reboot.

Then The chameleon bootloader started. I could boot my OSX and Linux.Hooray! But then I tried windows entry. The chain to Windows BCD worked, but when i pushed enter I had a screen mentioning my windows install was screwed...Damn...

Then I booted from Windows DVD. Used diskpard to make my Win partition active, and rewrote MBR. Then I could finally boot windows. I finally used easy BCD to add an entry quite easily for my linux and OSX and the chain works fine.

 

Just a bit disapointed i could not get chameleon bootloader instead of BCD one, but at least everything works so I'd rather not mess with it anymore. Maybe Grub would have been a bit more flexible instead of BCD initially but anyway...

 

For adding the OSX entry with easy BCD and make it work, you have to copy the file located there /Usr/Standalone/i386/chain0 to the root of your windows drive (eg. C:)