Easiest triple boot ever. Leopard, Gutsy, Vista

[violajack]

I just spent the day trying to set up a triple boot via various guides out there and found that there is an easier way, especially for those who don't want to partition from the command line.

This is on a C2D Macbook.

I started from a clean install of Leopard on the whole disk. Then I installed rEFIt, since I wanted to make sure that would work. It didn't work from the installer, and I did have to venture into the terminal to fix it with the manual install commands:

cd /efi/refit
./enable.sh

Then I used Bootcamp Assistant to set up a 30G partition for Vista. This is the one step that most guides tell you not to do, they all say you have to partition from the terminal using diskutil resizeVolume. I just kept toasting my partition maps with that thing, and when I did get it right, the windows installer would complain and refuse to proceed. Going straight from bootcamp was the only way I could get the windows install to cooperate.

I completely installed Vista leaving me with OSX and Vista via plain old normal bootcamp. Bootcamp changes your startup volume, so I had to hold Alt to get the option to boot into OSX again. I reran the rEFIt enable.sh, but I'm not sure if that was really necessary. I had to then change the startup volume back to the mac partition, which allowed it to boot into rEFIt again.

From OSX, I used the GUI Disk Utility from the Utilities folder. If you click on the main disk (not on of the two partitions) you will have a tab option for Partition. From the graphic of the two partitions, click the main OSX partition, then click the little plus sign and it will split the OSX partition into two. You can then drag the space between to set the size of the new partition and name it whatever you want. Disk Utility will only format it as HFS+, but the Ubuntu live CD will gladly reformat it to ext3 for you. The partitions did not stay proportional size-wise in the GUI, but if you click on each, it should show the correct size in GB. Yes, it resized my OSX partition, while booted, nondestructively, without breaking my ability to boot Windows.

From there, I inserted the Ubuntu 7.10 live CD and restarted. rEFIt came up and I chose the option to boot to the Linux CD. I reformatted the new HFS partition as ext3 using the Partitioning tool, but I think it would have worked from in the installer as well. I ran the installer as normal, choosing to partition manually. It wanted to format the ext3 partition again to use it as root, so I let it. It complained about not getting a swap partition, but that's normal. The only thing to be careful of at this point is that in the last window of the installer, you have to click the "Advanced" button and tell it to install grub to the same partition as Linux, not hd0, or it will overwrite the Master Boot Record. In my case (EFI system on 1, OSX on 2, Linux on 3, and Vista on 4) that meant installing to /dev/sda3.

When that finished, I rebooted and hoped for the best. rEFIt came up with three entries! I have been able to boot all three OSes now just fine, with no partitioning from command line!

I hope this can help others out there looking for an easy way to cram all three OSes on a mac.