Easy Triple Boot

Hi,

i thought id share my experience.
I have a A150, 160G, 1.5g ( mod ), Dell1390 ( mod), touchscreen ( mod)!
As you can see since i got it i have modding it a lot to fit my needs.

I first installed osx in the entire partition to see if i could live with the issues of not sleeping and no card reader, and yes i can, also OSX is very fast in my system, so i decided to go dark side and triple boot the thing.
I read a lot and people say mbr, efi, hfs+, fat, af, all this acr that we just love and i thought i'd try a simpler approach, its called, lets see if/how it works.
So i started with a fresh install of osx.

I Used this tutorial ( thx guys ), to install the osx.

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=129774

Except that i did the following in the step 6 of the above:

I have separated my Hd in 4 partitions:
1 OSX = 80 G HFS+
2 Linux = 25G FAT32 ( dont worry )
3 Win = 25G FAT32 ( dont worry )
4 Common = 30G , this reminder i did it so i could easily share files between all three OS'.

And so on i continued with my install and update of OSX.

After everything was ok, i restared, made sure it would come back to OSX, all beautifully setup. Proceeded to install Windowz.
Windows you know, usual, just make sure you place it on the right partition and quick format it with FAT32.

After the setup restared the machine i had a disk error problem, im not sure what was it but it displayed the boot for the windows with two options for the same windows installation, the first option did not work and gave me a disk error but the second continued the installation. Ah, you might also get the windows install ( before this ) telling you that needs to mark the windows partition as active for the installation, but you dont have many options as it will do it anyway.

Ok i finished installing windows, got in the sytem and ok, restarted with the linux disk.
Press F12 to select the DVD drive and boom, lets go live installation of Linux 8.10
During the install make sure you know what you doing during the partition steps ( use manual ), select the 2nd partition you created, use ext 3 with journal system, mount it to "/". and proceed.

After it finishes the fun will start.
Now was the part where i had most of the problems but thanks to a bit of googling and all of you great community that writes in the posts ( and hey im here too ), i got it fixed easily. Lets make it simple as i said.

So having the 3 OS's installed confuses the boot loaders so when i restarted i got the GRUB without the MACOSX option ( expected ). So i knew i would have to edit the GRUB menu list to reflect OSX, so use this:

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=85508&st=0&p=606752&#entry606752

After you do that, you will be able to ( given you edit the menu.lst ) select the 3 OS's from the GRUB boot list.

VOILA! There you go, triple boot without complications.

Now going foward i wanted to have rEFIt working on, i installed in OSX but nothing comes up when the machine is restarted, so im not really sure as of why, and i dont care much for now, if you have any suggestions they are much appreciated, but if not, life goes on and i will figure it out sometime. I am updating my Ubuntu now ( im writing this on my mac mini ), wireless works fine under ubuntu first shot.

Ah, the best part is the touchscreen works on all three systems

Have a wonderfull and safe holidays!!!

Fred

 

rEFIt installs to the efi firmware, which we dont have access to on the aspire as of yet, so you will not be getting that working anytime soon.

nice setup, very similar to my guide posted here a bit back.

dave

 

Fair enough,

Thank you for your input on the rEFIt, any other recommendations as to a better looking boot graph boot manager ? I love grub but rEFIt is much cooler

 

You could try GfxBoot to give a GRUB a nicer look. I've been meaning to try it on my Aspire One. Here's a tutorial for Ubuntu - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=208855

How come you didn't format the Windows XP partition as NTFS btw?

 

i think i triple booted with xp just to do a triple boot, next project will be wipe windows out keep only osx and ubuntu .... since i installed i think i logged into windows once .... lol ....
BTW, i never worried about doing ntfs with windows

 

just noticed something,

When i tell osx to shutdown it looks like it shutdowns but the power still one in the AO1.
any ideas on how to fix this?

 

I have attempted this with a couple differences and now have a problem.
Main difference was my partition order:
1. osx
2. windows
3. linux
4. shared

osx went in with no problem, i installed TinyXP so had to install as ntfs, and i tried to install unbunto and thats where i ran into a problem. When i get to the partition part of the install and choose manual i only see the entire hard drive and don't see the other partitions.

I can set my mac partition as active and dual boot that way but would definitely like to boot unbunto as well

any help would be appreciated

robbie

 

Wouldn't it be easier to:

-Install Windows on a Partition
-Install Leopard on a Partition
-Fix Bootloader for Mac with EasyBCD
-Run Wubi in Windows?

I think I will do it so...seems easier for me

 

Have you tried rEFIt on AAO? It has its own way to access the EFI volume if you formatted GPT.
rEFIt is IMO the coolest boot manager around. Beats grub hands down for setup and use,
mind you that may be because I come with a Mac background.

 

did you format everything using disk utility of mac in your first os setup ? Did you do all the other partition schemes as FAT ?
Im not sure what happend to you, but i can share the pain because, when i attempted to do the GfxBoot i by stupidity of mine, broke the system, i was playing around and i think i reversed somethings, in the end my system was booting str8 into the grub command line and i could not recover anything from there ( or did not bother spending a couple of hours ), trying to re install ubuntu did not work for the same reason you were having your problem, Linux would not see my linux partition, it would only see the entire disk .... weird huh ?
Do you want to share your "fdisk -lu" with ??

Maybe we can come up with some suggestion. Myself personally i love experimenting with my Aspire one, right now im lying on bed and im kinda fed up with OSX so im running only ubuntu in the entire disk. I have downloaded the xXx 10.5.5 disc which soon i will be installing and dual booting with Linux, but thats a project for after my vacation

 

Will this work with the Acer Linpus version aswell.
I would love to be able to dualboot both OSX and Linpus, but untill now it looks like it's not posible... or really really hard to get it working anyway.

 

Just to let you know that I did manage to get Linpus and OS X both booting, so it is possible, by also installing Ubuntu-Eee. I made space for OS X by shrinking the Linpus partition but then found that I couldn't boot Linpus after the OSX install was completed. Installing Ubuntu-Eee put Grub on the MBR and that allowed me to get all three OSes working.
All the best,
I

 

But how do I get the Linpus installation from not wiping my whole disc?

And is there a for dummies guide how to get it working, bare in mind that im new to all this...

 

Glad to report that I got it working.
I now have a quadruple boot system with OSX , Ubuntu 8.04 , Tiny XP , and Windows 7 .
Thanks to all for the great advice, i learned alot doing this.

 

I wanted let every one know that instaed of using grub as the bootloader i am using the one from Windows 7. Using EasyBCD you can change the bootloader in Vista or Windows 7 to load Mac OSX or linux installs. If anyone is interested i will write up a howto for this.