Triple Booting XP,Vista and OSX

[peterg]

Triple Booting XP,Vista and OSX

Sounds too good to be true ? will it can be tricky, so I thought that I would give you the benefit of a 24 hour stretch in front of the computer.

 

Firstly, let me say that this guide isn’t going to be one of those super guides that tell you each button to click in order. Other people are better at doing those than me.

 

To start you will need:

Windows vista installs (not an OEM copy)

Windows XP installs (not an OEM copy)

OSX Hackintosh installs

Easy BCD program (for Vista)

GParted Live CD

 

I am also assuming that you know how to get all of these going independently. Installing Operating systems is largely boring, so get a movie to watch on another screen.

 

A very useful tool to have is GParted Live CD. You should burn a copy of this to a CD before you begin.

 

These instructions assume you are going to wipe all of the systems and start from the beginning. So, some form of backing up may be prudent. During my trials when I coming up with this solution I have had some weird behaviour from vista at one stage where it was installed on D: but vista thought that it was installed on C: (where XP was) and Vista was having all sorts of trouble.

 

The thing is I found that the order is quite important. I tried a few combinations before coming up with XP, OSX, Vista.

Mostly because Vista has a ‘new and improved’ boot loader that caused me a fair amount of distress.

 

So you need to have three partitions on the hard drive, they need to be set up as simple partitions (not extended), the easiest way to do this is to boot from GParted (choose VESA option) and partition the hard drive as you see fit. I set 40GB for windows & Vista and the remainder for OSX. Format all drives as fat32 for now, and make sure you are not making extended partitions., apply changes and reboot

 

Now, boot and install windows XP. Make sure you select the first partition and change the filing system to ntfs if you prefer. (start the movie)

 

After XP is working install OSX. You will of course need to change the filing system to a mac version, from the install program go to disk utility on the menu, then select the hard drive/ second partition (that was formatted as fat32 by gparted) then format it to a Mac OS Extended Journaled drive (the movie should be getting interesting by now)

if you are new to installing OSX then there are loads better guides than mine on this forum that cover installing the mac in great detail.

A few tricks – on the registration page press command q and skip

- if you are going to use the migration assistant then make your first account with a new name (like temp)

 

Now, OSX should have written its own boot loader which will work great if you only want to use OSX/XP, but we want to use vista as well so,

On the mac you need to change the default boot options.

 

Open a terminal and type

sudo nano /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

 

Here is a copy from my system.

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="1.0">

<dict>

<key>Kernel</key>

<string>mach_kernel</string>

<key>Kernel Flags</key>

<string>rd=disk0s3</string>

<key>Boot Graphics</key>

<string>Yes</string>

<key>Graphics Mode</key>

<string>1280x1024x32</key>

<key>Quiet Boot</key>

<string>No</string>

<key>Timeout</key>

<string>4</string>

</dict>

</plist>

 

the important thing to make sure you have is the Timeout key

 

if you don’t want to see the windows partitions when you are using the Mac, then you can unmount the partitions each time you start up. To do this:

from a terminal type:

nano /etc/rc.local 

enter the following:

diskutil unmount "/Volumes/XP"

diskutil unmount "/Volumes/Vista"

 

where XP and Vista are the names of your XP/Vista hard drives respectively.

 

Disconnect all other hard drives connected to the PC at this time.

 

Install vista. You will need to format the third partition as ntfs (vista can’t be installed on a fat32 drive). Now at this stage if you have another hard drive connected vista may give you an error (something needs to write some info to the hard drive but cannot). Things will probably go smoother if you have no other hard drives connected at this point.

 

Continue to install vista (the movie should be finished, start watching another ?)

 

After vista restarts five times, tells you how slow your really expensive computer is and shows you loads XP windows that look prettier, run the program easy BCD.

This software is really cool. What you need to make it do is set up the hard drive booting order. Firstly delete all the options there are the moment.

Then add a new boot item, (select XP from the options) name you XP startup.

Then add a new boot item, (select Macintosh OSX ) and name the mac drive

Then add the vista boot item (select Vista/longhorn) option.

EasyBCD also lets you other things like setting the automatic timer and default os to boot

 

That should be about it.

to copy from your mac backups don’t forget the program Migration Assistant that lurks in the applications:utilities folder, this software copies all of your data from your old hard drive - programs you installed everything. it only has problems some times with programs that are installed with the installer package (like iLife, CS3) but many things just work and it saves loads of time.

 

Now when you turn on the PC it should run the boot loader for Vista. Then if you select the Mac OSX option it will go the mac os boot loader. Then it will boot osx.

 

Some of the other guides talk about setting the active parition with vista boot loader.

The problem with this is that it takes ages to load vista install, choose repair get a command prompt etc. faster way to do this is to load Gparted disk, right click on partition and set flags. Just select the active partition.

 

If I set the mac partition as active (to use the darwin boot loader before vista) I get a HFS error. There is a solution for this, but I thought why bother ? it works this way, why tempt fate ?

 

Of course all of this is just to make it easier for others. If this guide helps you then great, otherwise you are on your own! I am not going to guarantee that my method will work in each situation, I just found it worked for me.

Criticisms and discussion are of course welcome.

[Computer Guru]

Thanks for that guide, looks good.

 

Some links missing from your article:

EasyBCD: http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

GParted: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

 

[guaterickie]

Wow, great guide really, it does make sense to install vista last. I just tried doing this by myself and ran into a problem. i installed xp, then vista, then os x. vista and xp worked great but after installing os x i am not able to boot up windows parititions at all. no matter what kind of tricks i use. i am going to try this. no work tomorrow so im going to be at it all night and sleep in tomorrow. cant wait to see the result. will try to post back with a result. thanks!