Windows Express

Sorry it has taken so long to post on my progress for the triple boot project.  I have run into some snags on the next step – installing Mac OS X.  So, in the words of Ignacio from Nacho Libre – “Let’s get down to the nitty gritty…”

So now I have Linux Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows 7 installed on seperate partitions in a dual-boot environment using the GRUB boot loader from Linux.  It works great!  My first step after this was to locate an .iso file from which to make a boot disk for OSX.  If you browse your native torrent site or visit Neo from The Matrix you will soon have a copy of one of the several distributions of OSX86, the name given to an OSX installation disk with patches added to run on a normal X86 PC.  The two I found were iDeneb v1.4 10.5.6 and Kalyway 10.5.2.  iDeneb is the newer version, obviously, so that was my first choice to install. You can find installation insructions on the OSX86 project wiki. Go to Their Website and browse around.

After burning the disc I restarted my computer (make sure to set the BIOS to boot from DVD first) and the installation took off.  It takes a long time for the installation menu to pop up, but everything related to the installation went just fine.  Select your native language and continue to the next screen.  From here you can use the “Disk Utility” function from the Utilities tab at the top of the screen and format the partition of your choosing into a Mac Extended Journal format.  Continue to the next screen and select that partition for the installation.  Continue.

Here is the hard part. You MUST select “customize” before installing and check all of the packages that correspond to your hardware.  This is where the problems begin.  It takes a lot of trial and error, but if you get everything right the installation should work after the reboot.  After selecting everything continue on with the installation.  The installer will check the DVD for errors and then install OSX.  After it is complete (about 10 minutes on my machine) it will reboot.  After your BIOS screen it should boot into Darwin, OSX’s bootlader.  From here, if you press F8, you can type a number of things into the command line to try and get the installation to work.

• -F=Something about switching driver loading, so if you have installed the wrong patch it may skip it and still load correctly.
• -V=Verbose mode, which lists the commands on the screen instead of showing the Apple logo with a spinning wheel.  Useful to see where problems arise if they do.
• -X=Safe mode
• platform=X86PC – Tells the bootlader that your computer isn’t a Mac basically.  Has solved some people’s problems.
• rd=diskXsY tells OSX where to boot from, where X is the Hard Drive number (usually 0) and Y is the partition number on the drive.  You can see this on the Darwin bootloader screen where it will usually look something like this:

   Windows partition (0,1)
   OSX86 (0,3)

Anyways, my installations so far have gotten hung with an error message saying “Still waiting for root device.”  I have tried a number of configurations and will try the Kalyway disk as well.  After that I’ll post an update.

By the way, this will wipe out the Windows bootloader.  If you want to replace it I figured out a very easy way.

1. Open the start menu, type “cmd”, and hit enter to open the command prompt.
2. Type “diskpart” and hit enter to open the disk partition tool.
3. Type “list disk” and hit enter to show all the hard disks.
4. Type “select disk X” and hit enter, where disk X is the hard disk your Windows partition is.
5. Type “list partition” and hit enter to show all the partitions on disk X.
6. Type “select parition X” and hit enter, where partition X is your Windows partition.
7. Type “active” and hit enter. This marks your Windows partition as the active one during booting.
8. Type “exit” and hit enter. Close the command prompt.

After you reboot your computer the Windows boot manager should be back in effect and you won’t have to deal with Darwin anymore. Just a little something I picked up that is useful.  You can also do this to mark y0ur OSX partition as active to bring back the Darwin bootloader.  I’m assuming the same for Linux as well with GRUB.

Sorry for the ridiculously long post; this isn’t a short process.  Stay tuned because later I will post my results for the ongoing triple boot project, along with reviews of some freeware (idea courtesy of Rich from Mintywhite) and some other posts.