Installing on a single disk for dual boot with XP

[Steve UK]

I've read a lot of websites that all say 2 disks are required for installing OSX. Here's the method I used to get OSX on my HP laptop keeping the XP partition to allow dual-booting.

 

Started with my Windows laptop, single disk, single XP partition.

 

I used Partition Magic to shrink the single partition down by 10GB (on a 40GB disk). This leaves 10GB of unused disk space at the end of the disk. In XP - Disk Management, I then created a primary partition of 10GB, but didn't format it or assign it a drive letter.

 

I then booted off a Darwin/x86 v8 CD. I chose the manual partition method. List the partitions and you should see a single NTFS partition and a primary DOS partition (created by XP - ). Edit the 2nd partition and set it's type to be AF - HFS+, the standard partition type for OSX. Write the change out, and then either reboot or allow Darwin to install toi completion and then reboot.

 

You should now have your disk partitions setup for OSX installation. Boot from the OSX DVD (patched if required and the OSX installer should see the 2nd partition and choose it for install by default.

 

Works for me. I now have a working OSX installation with sound, networking etc.