mmm11105 Posted November 14, 2009 Share Posted November 14, 2009 Hello, I am looking into "Hackintoshing" my PC but need asome triple booting advice. My Hard Drive Looks like this Physical Drive 1:Windows Physical Drive 2: Ubuntu & 30 GB Free Space for OSX How would I install OSX on that 30 GB portion without screwing up Windows, Ubuntu, or GRUB (my bootloader)? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/197586-triple-booting-wo-re-installing/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
mmm11105 Posted November 14, 2009 Author Share Posted November 14, 2009 I have the iPC Leopard Disc Would installing it on the empty space then using a Ubuntu Live CD to restore GRUB work??? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/197586-triple-booting-wo-re-installing/#findComment-1331127 Share on other sites More sharing options...
chokia Posted November 15, 2009 Share Posted November 15, 2009 1. Remove / Disconnect HD cable with windows 2. Just install OSX on that 30GB space and forget about it (dont bother if it can reboot. Off the PC) 3. ReConnect windows HD, boot windows and install BootThink. (click /Darwin/MBR/SetupMBR.bat) Reboot. You will have triple boot after that with beautiful bootloader. Boot to OSX (depends on how you name your OSX partition) and continue OSX installation. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/197586-triple-booting-wo-re-installing/#findComment-1331562 Share on other sites More sharing options...
srs5694 Posted November 16, 2009 Share Posted November 16, 2009 I have the iPC Leopard Disc Would installing it on the empty space then using a Ubuntu Live CD to restore GRUB work??? In theory, yes. In practice, boot loaders can be finicky and unpredictable, so I can't promise you won't run into any problems. The iPC install at least does support both MBR and GPT, so you shouldn't have to worry about that issue. Chokia's suggestion of disconnecting the Windows disk during the install is a good one; that'll keep your Windows installation safe from accidental damage. I'm less enthusiastic about Boot Think. Chokia is a big fan of Boot Think, but it definitely is not the answer to all boot loader problems. In your case, it won't boot Linux directly, so you'll still need a GRUB (or LILO or other Linux-enabled boot loader) configuration somewhere in the mix. Installing GRUB to your Linux partition and using Boot Think (or Chameleon or some other OSx86 boot loader) as the first boot loader can certainly work, but you may need to re-install GRUB to get this to work. (I don't know from your description how GRUB is currently installed on your system. There are at least three possibilities: On the first disk's MBR, on the second disk's MBR, or on a Linux partition's boot sector.) The trouble is that boot loaders can clobber each other, so you need to have emergency boot plans. I recommend backing up the first sector of each hard disk after each OS installation (as in "dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.mbr bs=512 count=1" in Linux to back up the first disk's boot sector), so you can restore it or use the backup file in a chain-load configuration. To use GRUB as your primary boot loader, you need to install everything but the MBR-resident part of an OSx86 boot loader. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/197586-triple-booting-wo-re-installing/#findComment-1332329 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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