Could MBR be the source of my problems?

[Foxic]

First off, I'll give you my story.

 

Last weekend I made my first hackintosh using an EX58-UD5 motherboard, an Nvidia 480GTX, in i7 920, and some sick fast Corsair RAM. Oh an 2 x 1TB Seagate HDs.

 

I decided to install OS X, Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and seeing as I use all 3 quite regularly I thought I'd install them all on 1 HD and leave myself 1Tb for shared storage.

 

I partitioned my first HD GUID and installed OS X, Windows 7 and Ubuntu, all good but then windows started giving me an 0xc000000e error, (which I now know is an easy fix).

 

I tried a repair and it said it could repair, so I formatted Windows and tried again, this time it threw an error about the GPT partition table.

 

At this point I cloned my OS X partition onto the other HD, and reformatted the first HD as MBR before copying OS X back, reinstalling Windows and then Ubuntu, then sorted the 0xc000000e error windows was throwing, using Diskpart (oh if only I knew this bit the night before).

 

Upon restarting I noticed I could no longer boot Ubuntu using chameleon even though grub was installed to / (sda5).

 

Anyway, I though I'd sort that one out later with a live cd and just re-install grub through a root shell via apt-get.

 

I get on with installing cornerstone and xcode and iOS sdk, and then adobe...hold on what's this..can't install to case-sensitive volume.

 

Now being the idiot I am, I read on someone's blog that adobe could ONLY be installed to case sensitive, I thought great, I like case sensitive volumes (I've always used some linux distro so you know). Well thanks a bunch to who ever's blog that was. What a handy piece of mis-information.

 

I thought, no worries, Disk Utility to the rescue.

Booted off SL disk and ran disk utility, cloned my OS X install to my second HD again and then reformatted the OS X partition on the first HD to non case-sensitive, I then tried to restore the OS X partition to the new non case-sensitive volume, without erasing destination.

 

It sat there for 45 mins, looked all good, then sat for an hour saying less than a minute.

 

At this point I turned it all off and went to bed.

 

 

So it's pretty obvious I need to start again, I've made a few errors, but most importantly i have learned from these errors.

 

One thing that strikes me is that Ubuntu ran perfectly when I was using the GUID (high-bred) partition table, but when I switched to MBR I couldn't boot into it from chameleon, even from the [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] or Nawcom swap disks.

 

So does Ubuntu require a GUID? If not, why would chameleon not pick up grub when it was installed to the Ubuntu /. Coincidence?

 

So tonight the goal is to get it all back up and running (I'm a dab hand at this now), using a non case-sensitive volume so I can install CS5 and actually get on with my life.

 

My question is, should I use GUID or MBR.

 

Windows prefers MBR and if I ever need to re-install or possibly upgrade to Windows 8 when it comes out, using MBR would make the process easier (no GPT partition errors, which I could not solve).

 

Ubuntu seems to prefer GUID in this triple boot scenario.

 

I really want to put all 3 on 1 drive.

Call me anal but having all music, films, etc on a separate hard drive gives me a certain comfort, knowing that I can format the OS without transferring or loosing over 100Gb of music (yes I do have spotify BTW).

 

So what do I do?

 

OS X is the easy bit, Bill Gates' {censored} child is giving me headaches and Ubuntu isn't being much better. In all honesty, I feel like kicking a penguin (though I wont of course )

 

Thanks for reading, I hope someone can give me a few ideas, as after all I am new to the whole hackintosh department.

[Foxic]

Just found some info:

 

MBR only allows four primary partitions

 

So:

 

EFI

OS X

Windows

Linux /

Linux /home

Linux swap

 

6 partitions, but surely only 4 of those need to be primary?

 

Looks like the GUID/MBR high-bred partition table might be the only way to get this working on a single drive.

[Foxic]

Well I re-installed everything from scratch using a GUID and now the triple boot works perfectly.

 

I had a strange problem with my magic mouse and bluetooth keyboard after the 10.6.6 update but I seem to have solved that by using the iobluetoothfamily kext from 10.6.3, where the mouse and keyboard work perfectly.

 

I now only need to get sound working and I'm done.

 

I've heard the VoodooHDA.kext is the one I need to get onboard sound working.

 

Can anyone point me in the right direction on this?

[srs5694]

I realize you've already gone ahead and re-installed, but I thought I'd answer a couple of your questions, in case you still care or in case anybody else needs the information....

 

One thing that strikes me is that Ubuntu ran perfectly when I was using the GUID (high-bred) partition table, but when I switched to MBR I couldn't boot into it from chameleon, even from the [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] or Nawcom swap disks.

 

So does Ubuntu require a GUID? If not, why would chameleon not pick up grub when it was installed to the Ubuntu /. Coincidence?

 

First, it's a hybrid MBR, not a high-bred anything. "High-bred" makes it sound like it's British royalty or something, but it's anything but -- hybrid MBRs are ugly, dangerous, flaky things that, to use a breeding analogy, would be more like some weird mythological cross between an octopus and a housefly or something.

 

To the main issue, though, Ubuntu, like most Linux distributions, works fine on either Master Boot Record (MBR) or GUID Partition Table (GPT) disks. MBR is better-tested, but GPT has some advantages. My suspicion is that your problem was caused either by the change from MBR to GPT (since GRUB needs to know which it's using, so if you switched that without modifying GRUB, it might have caused GRUB to flake out) or by some sort of bug in Chameleon or its configuration. Certainly there are plenty of people who use Chameleon as a primary boot loader and then boot GRUB as a secondary boot loader (and from there boot Linux).

 

My question is, should I use GUID or MBR.

 

Personally, I'd use a straight MBR setup for a triple-boot on a single hard disk. A GPT setup will require a hybrid MBR, which as said, is flaky and dangerous. (I provide all the gory details on my Web page on hybrid MBRs.) OTOH, OS X is happier with GPT, so some things, like re-installing OS X, may be easier if you use GPT.

 

A better option is a two-disk configuration. That way, you can use GPT for OS X, MBR for Windows, and put Ubuntu on whichever disk has a suitable amount of free space for it. You can also split installations in some cases, although you need Windows Vista or later (or certain earlier versions) to read GPT. (In Windows, a hybrid MBR disk is treated as an MBR disk, but Windows Vista or later can still read a pure-GPT disk as a data disk.)

 

Ubuntu seems to prefer GUID in this triple boot scenario.

 

No. If you started with MBR and installed Ubuntu directly to that, it would be fine.

 

EFI

OS X

Windows

Linux /

Linux /home

Linux swap

 

6 partitions, but surely only 4 of those need to be primary?

 

In a pure-MBR setup, the OS X and Windows partitions need to be primary; Linux is happy on logical partitions. You wouldn't need an EFI System Partition on such a disk.

 

In a GPT/hybrid-MBR setup, only Windows needs to be in the MBR as a primary partition; OS X and Linux will use GPT, so they don't care if their partitions are in the hybrid MBR. The EFI System Partition is required only on EFI-based systems, but I'm not sure if the OS X installer will install to a GPT disk that lacks one. Note that in a hybrid MBR, you shouldn't have extended or logical partitions; they'd be a nightmare to maintain, and AFAIK no utility attempts to do this. Thus, in a hybrid MBR setup, GPT-capable OSes (such as OS X and Linux) can read all the partitions, but the MBR-using OSes (such as Windows) will see a maximum of three primary MBR partitions. (One MBR partition is devoted to the type-0xEE EFI GPT partition that identifies the disk as a GPT disk. Note that this is not the same as the EFI System Partition.) If you were to add a data-transfer partition that should be readable by Windows, it should also appear in the primary MBR table.