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General discussion

Triple boot partitioning and file system question

Sep 3, 2007 1:39PM PDT

Soon, I hope to have a macbook which will come with an 80GB hard drive. Originally, I was thinking that'd be too small for triple booting, but lack of money and extra thinking, and I think perhaps I can make it work.

Mac OSX Tiger
Linux Fedora 7
Windows Vista

How much space should I give to each OS, and should I have a separate partition for swap in Linux (whenever I install it, it always gives me the option)?

The second part to this question; whatever space is left over, I'd like to turn into a media/documents storage partition, preferably accessible to all three OS's. Linux now has NTFS read AND write capabilities ... but what about Apple's OSX? What sort of NTFS capabilities does it have?


I suppose I could do four 20GB partitions, but could I perhaps shrink the OS partitions just a bit to increase the media storage?
What's the recommended minimum for each of the three OS's?


This is off-topic, but I keep reading in all these different OSX threads about "permission repairing." What is that about, and why is it done? It seems to be important, so I figured I'd ask in case I need it for my new macbook.

Discussion is locked

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Triple Booting
Sep 3, 2007 9:48PM PDT

I'm not sure how you plan to go about this but I don't think that Boot Camp will be the answer for you.
As far as I know, Boot Camp will only work with two partitions, OS X and Windows, I have not heard anything to the contrary.
Hopefully you do not believe that by partitioning the drive, you will be able to install those three OS's without the aid of third party software.
However, you would certainly be able to do it with one of the Virtual Machine type programs, Parallels or Fusion spring to mind.
These programs do not use a separate partition on the HD, they create a virtual HD in a directory of their own. This is similar to the Virtual PC for Windows which allowed a Windows machine to run a variety of OS's.

20GB is going to be a little small and if you are serious about this project, you might want to look at a larger internal drive or go for a large external.

OS X can read from, but not to, an NTFS formatted disk. Likewise, Windows cannot read or write to an HFS+ formatted disk.

Repairing Permissions is a Unix thing. Every file has its own set of permissions, who can read/write/move/delete/etc. which sometimes get messed up by third party installations. Messed up permissions cause strange problems. Repairing them, by comparing the permissions with a list of what they should be, has been know to solve these.

P

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re: boot camp
Sep 4, 2007 12:04AM PDT

Hm, only two? Well that bites. I thought it'd be like GRUB, which can have lots of OS's. Out of curiosity, what limits Boot Camp to two?

Also, if it's two, can it be OSX and Linux? Or is the second only for Windows?

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Boot Camp
Sep 4, 2007 1:10AM PDT

the problem is the MBR, EFI, GPT and other neat stuff.

There is nothing that I could find on the Apple site to indicate that another OS, apart from Windows, could be used in the Boot Camp partition.

I did find this article that you may find interesting.

http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_Boot

Good Luck

P

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Boot Camp for Linux Distros
Sep 7, 2007 2:41PM PDT

To my knowledge, Linux distributions that have been specifically coded and compiled for Mac systems should work on Macs, even without Boot Camp. That was the situation before Apple switched to Intel, but I don't really know if this still applies.
Boot Camp, if I'm not wrong, is to boot IBM-compatible operating systems, which is to say, the PC versions of Linux. This is because PC BIOS use a different method of communicating as compared to the entire Mac infrastructure (which is regarded as a better architecture, by the way), and thus PC OSes need emulation of some sort to work on Macs.

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Boot Camp for Linux
Sep 7, 2007 2:42PM PDT

Oops, I just realised that with the new Intel processors, Ubuntu has stopped building native Mac distros. You now need to use Boot Camp because Ubuntu only comes in PC-compatible versions. Sorry.

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MacBook Triple Boot Install issues, partitioning
Sep 7, 2007 5:20PM PDT

The problem with multibooting on a Macbook is there is no perfect partitioning tool for all three OS's. Bootcamp wants only two partitions, Grub has its's difficulties of adding scrip to boot menu list, and Windows wants to take over and not see either other OS. There is some useful web posting you can google on the how too, and several different approaches. The last approach to partitioning and installing on my Macbook Pro was to install apple OSX 10.4, download bootcamp to make windows drivers CDROM of apple compatible drivers, but not to use bootcamp to do any partitioning. Then to use the apple terminal found in your utilities folder on the intel macbook to do partitioning in language all three OS's understand.
Here is a link to one useful site: http://sharealike.org/index.php/2006/05/26/macbook-triple-boot-howto-with-debian-etch-and-xp-upgrade-version/

good luck
John
praywaror2@hotmail.com

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Partitioning Macbook from within apples OSX with a terminal
Sep 7, 2007 5:32PM PDT

Opps here some more partitioning infomation from the link I posted earlier.

Partition your hard drive. (Um, you have a back-up, right?)

Type: diskutil list
It should give you something like:

/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *111.8 GB disk0
1: EFI 200.0 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 111.4 GB disk0s2

Find the identifier of your Mac OS X partion (in this case disk0s2) and type the following in order to repartition the drive. In the example below, I have repartitioned a 120Gb Hard disk to contain 60Gb OSX, 20Gb Linux and 31Gb windows partitions. You can change the volume names/sizes but not the order. (Making the GNU/Linux partition smallest made sense to me because it will be the only OS able to read all the other partitions so it will be able to access all the files, wherever located. So, probably all my photos and mp3s are going to be on the OS X partition.)

sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 60G Linux <name of linux volume> 20G "MS-DOS FAT32" <name of windows volume> 31G

3. Install Windows XP. You continue to follow the directions at OnMac except you plug in your external CD-Rom drive via USB and you place your old Windows 98SE disc (or comparable) in there. The Windows XP installer will find the external CD drive and your old copy of Windows without you having to do anything, except maybe press enter. Stop following OnMac?s directions just before you get to installing GNU/Linux.

When Windows boots for the first time, use your Windows XP drivers disc to add the drivers you need. Then add this Apple Mouse Utility to get right-clicking with CTRL. You?ll probably want that in your Startup folder.

You?ll also probably want a program to remap your keyboard. Currently, I don?t know how to make all the keys on the MacBook work under Windows, but I decided that a true DELETE key and a page-down key were important enough to me to sacrifice my right Apple key and that stupid little extra enter key. The linked ?remapkey? program will allow that.

You now have a dual-boot system!

4. Install the rEFIt bootloader. Download the latest rEFIt (I used 0.7). Mount the disk image, copy the efi folder to your root directory, and run the enable script. That is, you?ll need to open a terminal in OS X and type:

sudo mv /Volumes/rEFIt/efi /efi
cd /efi/refit
./enable.sh

I would try booting into both operating systems a couple times. I didn?t do this step at this point, and think it would have gone more smoothly if I had. So, I?m asking you to save yourself some trouble: do it!

Update: I now believe that if you run the gptsync tool that rEFIt provides then the Debian installation (particularly the lilo part) will go much more smoothly. You need to get your EFI and MBR in sync before going to the next step. I didn?t do this at first and think that?s why lilo was such a pain to get working.

John

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re: info on triple booting
Sep 8, 2007 12:57AM PDT

wow, that's a lot of stuff! hehe
When I get a little more time, I'll read more into it, check out those links you gave me. School's been kinda hectic lately, though.

About the backup - Apple includes OSX CDs with their computers, correct? Also, does the CD include all the software they put on there, like iLife? If I do all this when I first get the mac, then even if I screw it up, I'll have a backup provided by Apple ... unless the extra software isn't included on the CD(s)?
One other question - putting the other OS's on there using bootcamp or such won't void the warranty, will it?

You mentioned XP - what if I want to install Vista; are your instructions (and OnMac's) the same? I know that Vista is not good (I've used it on other peoples' computers), but I'd like to use it a little more, get used to it, so I can help people who have trouble with it - also, so I can maybe play Halo2 on it.

That last step you mentioned: booting into both OS's a couple times, I'm not fully understanding - when do I boot into both? Also, which two (of the three) do you speak of? Also, what will that accomplish?


I can't remember if I've asked this before; but, I can't remember the answer if I got one: Windows Vista aero - does it work with a macbook's integrated video? And, how well if so?

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I wanna do this in a different way
Nov 16, 2007 12:38PM PST

This may sound wierd, but I want to triple boot OSX, XP 32-bit, and XP 64-bit. Is this possible? If so, how?

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For you, ask one question.
Nov 16, 2007 9:48PM PST

Is XP64 on the supported list for bootcamp?

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Correction...
Sep 7, 2007 9:40PM PDT

[quote]Repairing Permissions is a Unix thing.[/quote]

Correction: Repairing Permissions is a Mac OS X thing. I doubt the OP will ever need to "repair permissions" on his forthcoming Fedora system.

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You are absolutely Correct.
Sep 7, 2007 10:57PM PDT

I think the brain slipped into neutral during that post.

My Bad

P

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re: repairing permissions
Sep 8, 2007 1:00AM PDT

Yeah, I've never had to do that in my previous linux installs, but I still don't get why permissions would go into a state of disrepair.
P says "which sometimes get messed up by third party installations," so ... which third party software is the greatest offender?