This was the slightly easier bit. Once I had Vista and Fedora happily coexisting, I added OS X. Before I continue, I would like to point out that I am writing this for educational purposes only and in no way do I take responsibility for any actions taken by visitors to this site :).
With that little bit out of the way,I had installed and re-installed OS X more times than I can care to remember during the dual-boot phase with the same laptop, trying various different kexts and solutions to get things like the audio and ethernet working. I used this guide to install OS X and used the JaS 10.4.8 install disc.
OS X installation went as smoothly as it could, I did experince some kernel panics during boot at one point, I’m not sure exactly what was wrong but a reinstall solved the problems. After following the instructions in the guide to add OS X to the Vista boot menu, I had a fully functioning tri-boot system :).
This is where the major problem occurred. Due to the fact that the system I was attempting to quad-boot was a laptop, it only had one hard drive. I found that the partition table of any hard drive can only have four entries - meaning that my initial plan of having one partition per operating system and one FAT32 partition for music and documents (FAT32 is the only filesystem that can be reliably used by all three platforms) wasn’t going to work - unless I could convert one or more of the current partitions into a logical volume.
With quite a bit of research on Google and various message forums, I converted both OS X and Fedora to logical partitions using Acronis Disk Director on Hiren’s BootCD - that CD has been an absolute God-send for me, the amount of utilities that are included with it is astounding. After converting the partitions and creating the last two to be used for XP and data storage, a had a configuration which looked like this:
Vista - 30Gb NTFS (primary)
Fedora - 18Gb ext3 (logical)
OS X - 26Gb Mac OS Journalled (logical)
Media Center - 8Gb NTFS (primary)
Data Storage - 28Gb FAT32 (primary)
I know this isn’t the ideal configuration (three logical partitions sandwiched between two primary) but as I said in the introduction post, I was doing this as I was going along and using it as a learning experience :P.
Then came the Media Center install, that went pretty smoothly as well (to be honest the only OS that didn’t was Ubuntu - and that was GRUB’s fault), although before I ran the install I had to do a bit of partition hiding using GParted on the Ubuntu LiveCD. This is because without hiding the other NTFS and FAT32 partitions on the drive, the Media Center install will automatically copy the related boot files to the first readable partition it finds on the drive - and also set drive letters accordingly.
So I booted to the Ubuntu LiveCD, fired up GParted and set the “hidden” flags on the Vista and Data Storage partitions, and also set the Media Center partition as “boot”. After that, I ran the Media Center install without a problem, and booted into it a few times to check that all was well. I then booted back into GParted, removed the “hidden” flags and set the Vista partition as “boot” again.
The last thing left to do was add the entry into Vista’s bootloader. I had to copy three files to the C:\ drive from the XP installation drive - ntdlr, boot.ini and ntdetect.com. Once these were all in place, I created a new Legacy Bootloader using EasyBCD - I was getting lazy at this point - and rebooted with fingers crossed.
And that’s about it. It has been one hell of learning experience for me, and I hope that this series of blogs are of use to some people out there.
Thanks for reading!
