EFI triple boot : OS X Lion - Windows 7 x64 - Ubuntu 11.04 x64

[bogdanw]

First of all, this is not intended to be a guide, just a description of a lucky succession of steps I made without starting with the intention of the final outcome

My current system: Asus P8P67, Intel® CoreTM i3 2100, 2 x Kingston KVR1333D3N9/2G and for this test I've used an old SATA drive.

I've installed Lion formatting the drive with Guid Partition Table and two partitions, Lion on the second (easiest installation method by ^Andy^ but I've used HackBoot para Lion and in Chameleon Wizard selected Boot0hfs).

With Lion working well (FakeSMC, RealtekRTL81xx, and NullCPUPowerManagement in Extra Extensions no dsdt), I rebooted and started the Windows EFI installation: pressing F8 and selecting UEFI DVD, deleting the EFI and the first partition and letting Windows do the rest. At restart I selected from the F8 menu Windows Boot Manager.

Then I wanted to test Ubuntu also and selected again from the F8 menu UEFI DVD. Unexpectedly Ubuntu recognized the OS X installation and ask me if I wanted to keep it. It automatically resized the Windows partition and installed Ubuntu.

In the F8 menu I have now: 1- the hard drive, 2 - Windows Boot Manager and 3 - Ubuntu. Selecting 1 runs OSX, 2 Windows 7 and 3 Ubuntu with an option in the GRUB menu to start OSX but not actually working.

So, in the end, I've got an GPT/GUID hard drive booting EFI Windows 7 and Ubuntu and OSX by Chameleon.

I hope this story lead other to a more rigorous approach and, maybe, an unified bootloader on EFI partition.

 

Below is the current F8 and GRUB menu.

[DoubleDoubles]

Nice job, I'm currently waiting for my new desktop to arrive and I will try to triple boot. I'm hoping to get iAtkos S3 v2, Win 7 64-bit, and Linux Mint running.

 

Not sure if it will work though since I'm running and setting everything up with Windows tools and bootable USB sticks...