Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Triple Boot on MacBook Pro

Boy, Am I excited ????!!!!
This is something that I was wanting to do since I got my MBP last year. With the recent HDD upgrade, I was able to allocate more space and configure triple boot (Ubuntu 9.04, OSX Leopard, Windows XP). I just mostly followed the instructions at this Ubuntu community site. The high level steps that I followed are

1. Installed refit on OSX Leopard
2. Using boot camp, created a partition for Windows
3. Restarted OSX Leopard with Win XP CD (hold the C button to boot from CD)
4. Formatted the Win partition as NTFS and installed windows
5. Restarted and logged onto OSX
6. Using the disk utility, partitioned my Mac partition for Mac and Ubuntu. I just left the parition to be hfs and not ext3 or anything.
7. Restarted and booted onto Ubuntu 9 CD.
8. Installed Ubuntu onto the newly created partition. Specifed the parition to be / and ext3 file system. Also I didnt create a parition for swap since Refit cant handle more than 4 partitions. Although Ubuntu would warn, you can safely neglect it
9. Restart and voila !! Refit would pose you with 3 OS and choose the one you like.

The best part I liked was that Ubuntu just recognized my wireless card. In the previous dell laptop, I had a broadcom wireless card and it was a restricted driver and I always had to spend time configuring it.

Although I can use only 1 OS at a time, it just feels cool and nice to have 3 OS running on my MBP. Itz hard to explain unless you experience it I guess..

No comments: