Comments on: Dual, Triple, Quad Boot a Macbook with Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, and Windows Vista

By: Grandblabla

Grandblabla — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:21:36 +0000

Once more: Great, great work for that tutorial! The way to make the install is clean so far and as easiest as possible, compar to many other tutorial I found!

Unfortunatly for me, i’m stuck with the same problem as Archie excepted that I’m using Ubuntu 10.04… And no solution found yet!
Any idea?

By: bob

bob — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 03:15:28 +0000

Trying win7 instead of vista:

installed upto and including winxp. Rebooted before doing any ubuntu stuff and went into OSX. Rebooted and went into Win7 and got “error loading operating system” error.

ps. my macbook cd drive is not supported by rEFIt so i had to install off cd using C key on keyboard rather than selecting cd in boot menu.

By: djimi

djimi — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:27:25 +0000

Desire: OS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard), Windows 7, Windows XP, Ubuntu 9~10

Thanks for the tutorial – but I’m in the same boat as the previous comments. I installed to (hd0,2) and can’t boot into Linux (9.1) and I don’t even see Windows 7 (My choice instead of Vista) from rEFIt. Robert Elkow are you there? Did you find a solution? What am I doing wrong?

I thought I was wrong with a step the previous 3 times I started from scratch, but this time I made sure I followed it precisely. I did and it doesn’t work. Anybody with a better link or tutorial for a QUAD BOOT macbook, with current bootcamp drivers etc.?

Thanks for the help

By: Archie

Archie — Thu, 13 May 2010 00:14:51 +0000

Thank you so much for the guide. In my experience so far, everything has worked for installing OSX, Windows 7, and XP. However, once I got to Kubuntu 10.04, rEFIt would report it as “Legacy OS.” I quickly discovered the solution was to update rEFIt. But my new problem is booting Win7. I can boot it through Grub, but any attempt to boot through rEFIt causes the mac to report “Unable to load windows.” Every other OS boots fine from rEFIt. I’m not sure where the issue is, nor do I know enough about linux/grub to attempt to fix it. Any ideas?

By: sean

sean — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:40:15 +0000

I’m currently running on a triple booted mac: snow leopard, ubunutu 9.10, and windows 7. But I want to shrink my snow leopard partition down by 100 Gig and use that extra space to create a data partition that all three OSes can read from and write too. Is there a way to do that without having to reformat my hard drive and start with step 1 in your instruction?

By: Robert Elkow

Robert Elkow — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:46:09 +0000

Please see my my comments above for background information.

In that explaination I mention that when I boot into Ubuntu other choices come up which include Windows 7 – 64 and Windows xp. When I use the cursor to boot xp I get the GRUB menu again, When I use the cursor to boot Windows 7 it works just fine. I checked the grub.cfg file and compared the command paragraph for Windows 7 and xp. Except for going to different partitions like what I would expect the xp command paragraph has an additional line:

drivemap -s (hd0) $ (root)

Can anyone tell me what this means and whether it is causing the problem?

Should it be changed or eliminated?

I attempted to create another entry with this line left out but was not permitted to change the file because it was read only. How can I change it?

By: Robert Elkow

Robert Elkow — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:44:33 +0000

I am trying to quadruple boot a MacPro with four 1 TB hard drives. I want all the operating systems, OSX Snow Leopard, Windows 7 – 64, Windows XP service pack 3, and Ubuntu AMD 64, on the first disk. Half the second disk for NTFS data storage, half the third disk for FAT 32 storage, and half the fourth disk for LINUX storage. I initially divided each disk in half using BOOTCAMP and then used a live Ubuntu CD with gparted to create and reformat the partitions. On disk one partition 3 is for W7, partition 4 is for XP, and partitions 5 to 12 is for Ubuntui. I successfully installed Windows 7, and XP, and could boot into them. I made partition 5, /boot, followed by / and the others for Ubuntu. When it asked where to put GRUB I used the pull down and /dev/sda5. After Ubuntu was installed I restarted the computer and saw the rEFIt icons. No Ubuntu icon! Left to right, an Apple, Windows partition 3, Windows partition 4,legacy OS HD, Windows in partition 3, and Windows in FAT storage. The first two Windows partitions gave me W7 and XP as expected, the remaining 3 gave me XP. No Ubuntu! I then reformated the Linux partitions as ext4 and told GRUB to be installed in ((hd0,4). After reinstalling Ubuntu still no Ubuntu icon. Next to the Apple icon was a windows icon which booted into W7 as before, next legacy OS in partition 4 which led me to the GRUB boot menu with choices to Ubuntu, OSX, W7 in partition 3, and XP in partition 4 and a few others. When I tried to boot XP I got the GRUB menu again. Unable to boot into XP but could boot into W7 and Ubuntu, and I assume OSX, the remainder two icons showed windows and legacy flags, and were labeled Windows partition 3, legacy OS in FAT storage but behaved the same giving me the GRUB menu from which I could not BOOT XP. It looks as if GRUB overwrote partition 4? Although I told it to use partition 5. I attempted to search for GRUB using W7 but could not find it.

How can I install Ubuntu and get the proper icons on rEFIt and run all four operating systems without having to reinstall the MAC operating system and software?

By: pesca

pesca — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:54:01 +0000

good work! This guide was great help, but one more thing is left.

I decided to dual boot XP and Tiger on my iMac so I created two partitions. Tiger is working, but xp stops in the installation process at the first restart because some hal.dll file is reported missing or damaged.

I’ve read the comments above and it looks like I had to create a little partition between tiger and xp, is it possible? Can you suggest me something? Many thanks!

By: Dual, Triple, Quad Boot a Macbook with Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, and Windows Vista « HydTech

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 07:49:49 +0000

[...] Quad Boot a Macbook with Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, and Windows Vista moved to http://hydtechblog.com/2009/01/26/dual-triple-quad-boot-a-macbook-with-mac-os-x-ubuntu-linux-windows... Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Lenovo Thinkpad X60 with Fedora 10, openSuse 11, [...]

By: El canardo

El canardo — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:07:46 +0000

Hey chief ?
By curiosity do you think it’s possible to adapt your partition table to this one :

5 Partitions from the Volume Scheme. Label them as follows:

1. Seven (MS-DOS FAT)

2. Vista (MS-DOS FAT)

3. XP (MS-DOS FAT)

4. OSX (Extended Journaled)

5. Free space (Chose from the drop down. will be used for our Ubuntu Linux)

The fourth is always Xp : Wich we mark as active as usual..so no pb !

And if after the setting of Seven there is a message of a loading error -> Restore by the seven CD !

The fact we don’t create a data store partition is not a pb anyway if all partitions are read and writen by each 0s !

AND THIS TIME WE HAVE REALLY ALL THE CURRENT OSES USED IN THE WORLD, ON THE SAME MACHINE.. NO ?