How to Setup a Triple Boot Mac
by Patrick Klein (kleinpa@iastate.edu), IT Services
This information is for Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.5 only.
Setting Up a Triple Boot Mac Lab Build
Partition your hard drive into at least three partitions.
Install Mac OS X on the first partition of the drive.
Install Windows on the last partition of the drive. You will want to
reformat the partition NTFS.
Install Linux on the middle partition of the drive.
Sync your GPT and MBR partition tables.
Download and install rEFIt from
http://refit.sourceforge.net/.
I would recommend the manual install, as I have had problems with the
Automatic install in the past.
Reboot and select the Partitioning tool from the rEFIt menu. If it
asks you if you want to sync your GPT and MBR partitions choose yes.
If you make any changes to your system's partitions you will want to run
the Partitioning tool again.
Set up an improved bootpicker. I prefer Bootpicker for the convenience
of being able to manage the machines remotely while they are waiting
for an OS selection. However, Bootpicker will take a significant amount
of time to restart if OpenAFS is installed. It will be up to you to
decide if that time is excessive.
Set up Windows and Linux as normal. I recommend setting Windows to
reboot on logout in order to bring up the bootpicker consistently. I
would also recommend renaming the C drive to make it easier to identify.
Windows and Mac OS X handle time differently. Windows stores time in local
time; Mac OS X stores it in universal time, and then adjusts it to local
time when it is displayed. This will break Kerberos logins, and setting
automatic time syncing doesn't work quickly enough. To correct this
problem, we set the Windows registry key
to 1. This is a legacy key and its use is not fully supported by
Microsoft. There have been reports that this will cause issues with the
Windows clock after a few hours, but I have yet to produce any issues
with the Windows clock.
If you must create a Linux swap partition, place it at the end of the
disk, after the Windows partition.
Optional:
Hiding your Windows partition. Add the following line to your loginhook
to hide your Windows partition from users:
diskutil umount /Volumes/<Windows partition name>
Deploying a Triple Boot Mac Lab Build in a NetBoot and Ghost Environment
This guide assumes that you have both Ghost and NetBoot servers available.
Use NetRestore Helper to take an image of the OSX partition.
Verify that the Mac OS X image will deploy correctly, then zero out the
Mac OS X partition.
Use Bart PE builder to create a boot disk that includes ghost32.exe.
Boot from the Bart PE boot disk with an external NTFS or FAT32 hard
drive connected. The external disk should have a good amount of disk
space available, preferably more than 20gb. Another Mac booted into
target disk mode will work, provided it has an NTFS or FAT32partition.
Load ghost32.exe. Create a full disk image.
Boot your lab from the bart PE disks and deploy the ghost image.
Reboot, connect to the NetBoot server and deploy the Mac OS X partition.
Use the rEFIt partitioning tool to sync the GPT and MBR. If rEFIt is
not running immediately, boot into Mac OS X and reinstall it. You will need
to recreate your refit.conf if you reinstall rEFIt.
If you are not using rEFIt as your bootpicker, uninstall it now.
