Multi-boot with Grub

[YandaPanda]

For anyone who has been contemplating installing MacOS on a new drive, but are unsure how to get the whole ball of wax playing nice, here is how we got it to work:

 

We have an Intel DG965WH. This is a SATA native motherboard. We already had it installed with Windows XP and 64bit Ubuntu using grub as the bootloader. Since we were perfectly happy with that install, we bought a new SATA drive for the MacOS installation (WD GP500). We disconnected the old drive for the install so there would be no confusion by the bios. Set the bios to AHCI and installed clean. (Note: The Intel 10/100/1000 does not work, and the sound still requires some tweaking.)

 

Just as a test, we changed the motherboard back to IDE. This motherboard does some strange delays with AHCI, so IDE boot is considerably faster. Not only that, but XP will not run with AHCI. Voila! the MacOS drive booted without a problem.

 

So we installed the primary harddrive back where it belonged and tweaked GRUB to play nice with everyone in the same sandbox as follows:

 

- Boot into Ubuntu (if you are running a different flavor of Linux, the commands may be different)

- Open a Terminal

- type in: sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

- enter your password

 

# Ubuntu (or whatever other flavor of Linux you prefer) - Leave default as Linux will update this as needed
title Linux
root (hd0,1)
kernel (Let Linux/grub put this in!)
initrd (see above about letting Linux control this)
quiet

#Mac OS X - assuming it is on hard drive 2
title Mac OS X
root (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

#Windows XP or Vista partition
title Windows (Flavor-du-jour)
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

#End of listing

 

Save and reboot.

 

Note: You MUST keep your Windows/Mac listings AFTER any "AUTOMAGIC KERNEL LIST" comment line - otherwise GRUB will overwrite your changes the next time you update your Linux kernel (or you will learn the hard way like I did).

[C.k]

I tried this, but I got "error 12: invalid device requested"

 

My OSX partition is sda8, on a logical partition, which I'm guessing is causing the problems.

I don't have enough room to put it before the logical partition space, to make it a primary partition.

 

Any suggestions on how to make this work while it's a logical partition, or do I need to go through all kinds of mess to make it a primary?

 

I'd appreciate the help, thanks!

[mcsmart]

For booting Leopard (on seperate disk) I only need the following line in my grub.conf:

title Mac OSX Leopard
root (hd1)
chainloader +1

I am using munky's modified Chameleon bootloader and this way I do not loose functionality... This way should actually work with any Darwin bootloader, as long as OSX is the only installed OS on that drive.

I hope this helps people

 

 

- mcsmart