After I’d decided which operating systems to install, it was time to get to the dirty work of actually installing them. Seeing as I had dual-booted Windows Vista and Mac OS X before using the Vista bootloader I decided to use this method again for the quad-boot.

A quick run through the major specs of the laptop:
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 (2 x 1.66Ghz, 2Mb L2 cache)
Memory: 1Gb DDR2
Hard Drive: Western Digital 120Gb (111.79Gb formatted)

So Vista was installed without any memorable trouble, I gave it a 30Gb NTFS partition because Vista has a reputation for being resource-hungry. Then the fun started – I installed Fedora perfectly onto 15Gb, partitioning it using Fedora’s own installer. I ignored the need for a swap partition because I was going to be short on drive space and I wasn’t planning on using Fedora as the main OS on the laptop.

Getting GRUB to work properly proved to be my first learning curve. Where OS X had simply installed its bootloader on its partition and set it to be active, Fedora installed it onto the bootsector of the hard drive. Through Google I managed to find the commands to enter at the Repair prompt on the Vista installation DVD to re-write Vista’s bootsector:

bootrec /fixboot

bootrec /fixmbr

I then booted to the Ubuntu LiveCD that I had downloaded when I planned on installing Ubuntu. At the terminal, I entered:

sudo grub

find /boot/grub/stage1

I was given the partition number where Linux was installed and therefore where I had to reinstall the GRUB bootloader:

root (hd0,1)

setup (hd0,1)

I then had GRUB setup on the bootsector of the partition and not the drive. I later discovered that this could be done through one of the advanced menus on the Fedora installer. Oh well, live and learn .

Entering quit then returned me to the main command prompt, where I then had to take a disk-dump of the bootsector so I could feed it into the Vista bootloader:

sudo fdisk -l

sudo dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/linux.bin bs=512 count=1

The first command lists all of the partitions on the disk so I can see how Linux labelled them. The second command actually took the first 512 bytes (i.e. the first sector) of the partition and dumped it inside a file on the root drive called “linux.bin”. I then transferred this to my USB memory stick to put onto Vista.

Once I had my copy of GRUB dumped into a file, I booted into Vista and fired a command prompt. The “boot.ini” method has been changed to a command-line based bootloader, so if you’re confident with the command line you’re ok. If not, download EasyBCD from NeoSmart. Assuming you have called the file “linux.bin” and it’s in the root C:\ drive:

bcdedit /create /d “Fedora Core 7 – Linux” /application BOOTSECTOR

That will give you a long identifier string to use with the rest of these commands – in place of {YOUR-ID-HERE}:

bcdedit /set {YOUR-ID-HERE} device partition=C:

bcdedit /set {YOUR-ID-HERE} path \linux.bin

bcdedit /displayorder {YOUR-ID-HERE} /addlast

After that, I rebooted and I had a lovely dual-boot setup with Linux and Vista .

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 .

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!