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.

[cyberdork33]

the disk utility in leopard has a cool little "add partition" function. This makes things much easier.

[Subversive_One]

Thanks for this terrific walk thru. Your set up is exactly what I would like to do. I'm basically brand new to Ubuntu, but I like the idea of having it on my machine. As a total Linux Newb, I can follow almost everything you're saying... except this part:

Originally Posted by violajack ...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.

Would you mind giving me a little more detail on how I use the Partitioning tool?


Also... Did you end up installing LILO instead of GRUB? To be honest, I don't know the difference between either. It's just that all of the guides seem to recommend LILO, for some reason.

Thanks again!

Sub

[cyberdork33]

Originally Posted by Subversive_One Thanks for this terrific walk thru. Your set up is exactly what I would like to do. I'm basically brand new to Ubuntu, but I like the idea of having it on my machine. As a total Linux Newb, I can follow almost everything you're saying... except this part: Would you mind giving me a little more detail on how I use the Partitioning tool? Also... Did you end up installing LILO instead of GRUB? To be honest, I don't know the difference between either. It's just that all of the guides seem to recommend LILO, for some reason. Thanks again! Sub

You change the partion type in the ubuntu installer...

you do not need to worry about lilo. Grub is the default and works fine.

[Subversive_One]

Got it working!

Thanks for the walk thru!

[pxwpxw]

Originally Posted by violajack <snip> 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. <snip> .

That is a major improvement in Leopard GUI Disk Utility. Previously in Tiger, disk utility had to reformat the whole drive in order to change one partition.

Good howto.

[violajack]

Yeah, I was blown away when Disk Utility did the second partitioning for me. I had it pounded into me back when my dad was showing me how to install 5 OSes on one of the home computers (95, NT, Solaris, and 2 different versions of Redhat) that you cannot resize a mounted partition. Then again, I don't even remember if nondestructive shrinking was possible. We managed to thoroughly zorch a hard drive with Partition Magic. I guess I've always sucked at partitioning properly. So it was so awesome to see Disk Utility do it for me. I must have screwed up from the command line at least three times (requiring an erase disk and reinstall OSX each time) before I just tried that. I'm so glad to hear that people are finding my post helpful.

Some other things I've learned to add to the explanations:
Most of the guides say to use LILO. Most of the guides were also written based on 6.10. From what I've read, Grub had a bug that prevented it from working with EFI, so you had to use LILO instead. Grub has since been fixed and the 7.10 version works just fine with rEFIt.

The Partitioning tool = gparted. It can be run from the live CD by going into System > Administration > Partitioning (or something like that).

Another cool thing about the macbook - Desktop Effects works at the highest setting out of the box. I added Advanced Desktop Effects Settings and Emerald for a really nice looking setup. I miss my old nVidia based Sony less and less all the time.

[speedemonV12]

wow. That is a great tutorial. I am about to take the plunge. But one thing that I was wondering.
After doing all this, lets say I decide to stop using Ubuntu, what then happens to that partition? is it just stuck as a separate partition until i do a full disk partition? Or can i somehow get that partition to merge back with the os x partition?

[cyberdork33]

Originally Posted by violajack Another cool thing about the macbook - Desktop Effects works at the highest setting out of the box. I added Advanced Desktop Effects Settings and Emerald for a really nice looking setup. I miss my old nVidia based Sony less and less all the time.

Intel graphics = works.

[violajack]

Originally Posted by speedemonV12 wow. That is a great tutorial. I am about to take the plunge. But one thing that I was wondering. After doing all this, lets say I decide to stop using Ubuntu, what then happens to that partition? is it just stuck as a separate partition until i do a full disk partition? Or can i somehow get that partition to merge back with the os x partition?

That's a really good question. That's the problem I kept running into when I messed up my partitioning. I tried to use Disk Utility to delete the partitions I didn't want and then expand the main OSX partition to whole drive, but it never worked. It would say that the OSX partition was the full size of the drive in Disk Utility, gparted, and even in Disk Utility from the OSX install CD. But the finder told me I only had free space that lined up with the smaller partition size, and the bootcamp partitioner said the same. That's why I kept going back to erase disk and reinstall when it didn't work. There's more discussion here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=590525 about resizing mac partitions. There's an interesting way to do it with the bootcamp assistant, but I think that would require killing all the partitions that aren't the main OSX partition.

I guess I never thought about removing Ubuntu. I was with just OSX and Vista for a while, while I got used to using OSX, but with a new Ubuntu out, I just had to put it on again. I am so happy to be using linux again. The only thing that might change for me would be giving more space to linux.