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Dual, Triple, Quad Boot a Macbook with Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, and Windows Vista

In this  tutorial I will be showing you how to Quad boot your macbook with OS X, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Ubuntu Linux.  You can leave out the OSes you don’t want or replace them with something else.  This is just a general but detailed guide for noobz!

QUADBOOT SETUP

We will be installing OS X from scratch so all your setting will be deleted. You might want to back up the data with Time machine or another backup software. Insert the OS X DVD and reboot the macbook holding down the C key.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Select your Language.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Before we install the OSes, we will partition the hard drive into 5 partitions.  Go to Utilities and click on Disk Utility.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Select the Hard drive on the left.  Mine has a 120GB drive.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Click on the partition tab and select 5 Partitions from the Volume Scheme.  Label them as follows:

1. Vista (MS-DOS FAT and atleast 10GB)

2. Storage (MS-DOS FAT and however much space you want as a storage location)

3. XP (MS-DOS FAT and atleast 7GB)

4. OSX (Extended Journaled and atleast 20GB)

5. Free space (Chose from the drop down.  will be used for our Ubuntu Linux)

QUADBOOT SETUP

Click on Options and make sure GUID Partition Table is selected. Hit Apply

QUADBOOT SETUP

Click Partition

QUADBOOT SETUP

Now we are going to Install our first OS.  Select the OSX partition and continue.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Install

QUADBOOT SETUP

You can skip the check if you know the DVD is in good condition and without scratches.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Your Installing your first OS. excited?

Be patient.  This will take a while.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Restart your computer.

QUADBOOT SETUP

It will ask you for the second Disc.  Insert the second disc.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Installation Complete!! now pat yourself on the back.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Once you setup your OSX with your settings, open up the safari web browser and goto http://refit.sourceforge.net/ and download the Mac disk image

QUADBOOT SETUP

downloading….

QUADBOOT SETUP

once the download finishes, double click the image and then on the installer to install it.

QUADBOOT SETUP

After rEFIt is installed, insert the VISTA disc and reboot holding the  C key.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Select language.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Install.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Accept the terms.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Custom (advanced)

QUADBOOT SETUP

Select the Vista partition and format with NTFS before continuing with Install.

QUADBOOT SETUP

QUADBOOT SETUP

QUADBOOT SETUP

QUADBOOT SETUP

After restarting, you will see the rEFIt GUI.  select the second partition to boot into VISTA.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Goto My computer.

QUADBOOT SETUP

select the CD/DVD drive.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Eject the CD and insert the OSX disc.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Select Open folder.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Go into Boot Camp folder.

QUADBOOT SETUP

click setup.exe

QUADBOOT SETUP

Continue to Install the BootCamp drivers.

QUADBOOT SETUP

QUADBOOT SETUP

QUADBOOT SETUP

QUADBOOT SETUP

QUADBOOT SETUP

Select No to restart.  We need to mark our XP partition as active first.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Goto Control Panel.

QUADBOOT SETUP

System and maintenance

QUADBOOT SETUP

Click ‘Create and format hard disk partitions’ under Administrative tools.

QUADBOOT SETUP

right click the XP partition and formate with NTFS.

QUADBOOT SETUP

QUADBOOT SETUP

QUADBOOT SETUP

after formatting is complete, right click the XP partition and mark as active.

QUADBOOT SETUP

Hell yes.  Now eject the OSX disc and insert the XP disc.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Upon entering rEFIt, select boot from CD.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Select partition 4

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Let it do its thang.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

upon restart, Boot from partition 4.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Awesome!! Now you have 3 OSes. Take a break.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

In XP, goto my computer and eject the CD.  Insert the OSX disc.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Install Boot Camp drivers.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Select no to the restart.  Eject the OSX disc and insert the Ubuntu CD.  Now restart

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Boot from CD.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Select language

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Install Ubuntu

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Select language

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Pick your timezone.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Select USA – Macintosh for the keyboard.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Select the free space and click on new partition.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Now we will make a swap space for Linux.

Size: more than your RAM to be able to hibernate. My RAM is 2GB so I choose 2001MB.

Location: End

Use as: Swap area

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Create another partition.

Size: Use the remaining disk space.

Location: Beginning

Use as: Ext3

Mount point: /

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

type in your username and password.  Don’t forget your password.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

nothing to migrate.  so leave this blank.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Click on advanced and in the drop down box type in (hd0,2)

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

proceed normally

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Restart.

Ubuntu will ask you to remove the disc and press ENTER.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

You will come back to rEFIt

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Start the partitioning tool.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Type Y to update the MBR.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Boot from the Linux partition

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

Boot into Vista.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

You should get an error.  If you get this error, Follow the directions and enter the Vista CD. restart the computer and select Boot from CD from the rEFIt menu.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

repair and restart.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

now we want our Ubuntu to start automatically without waiting for a timeout when we select the Ubuntu partition, instead of showing us the Grub menu.  To do this, boot into ubuntu and open a terminal shell.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

type sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

enter your password.

QUADBOOTING A MACBOOK

you will be presented with the grub configuration file in a text editor. change the timeout to 0.

Enjoy your QUAD BOOT MACBOOK !!!!

You can download this tutorial as a pdf here, but please give me credit.

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53 Responses to “Dual, Triple, Quad Boot a Macbook with Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, and Windows Vista”

  1. kevinthetechguy Says:

    wow, this is an amazing detailed guide. i like the effort you took with all the pictures.

  2. johnx Says:

    I agree with kevinthetechguy, great effort…I will adapt this guide for my requirements (no Vista for starters)…thanks!

  3. tecko Says:

    Hey Man!
    You do not know how glad I am to find your detailed guide. I was stumbling 3 Days with getting my quadboot to work until I found your guide. Thanks again. You saved my Ass (I mean my computer ;-)
    Cheers and have a nice day!!!

  4. Jhon Says:

    Quick question install without bootcamp partitioned disk ?

  5. HydTech Says:

    yes, just follow the directions. :)

  6. steve Says:

    can not get linux boot as it freezing

  7. Mike Says:

    Without partition 3 as a storage – IT DOES NOT WORK – you will get a hall.dll stop error in windows xp….

    i made my storage partition as small as i could (i just do not want one). partition 3 storage = 1gb…..

  8. mojacko Says:

    can we just do a 3 partition:

    1. for the OSX?
    2. Windows xp or 7
    3. Storage backup

    i only want 3 partition… and i dont want to format again and again..

    thanks

  9. stinz Says:

    Thank you very very much – a great help. Work fine :-)
    Now just have to figure out to set up internetconnection with and with out wire ;-)

  10. bretquigley Says:

    yes, and its actually not very hard because you can use the boot camp bootloader instead of setting up rEFIt. use the boot camp utility to partition your hard drive into two partitions, one for mac os x and one for windows. when it asks you to put in the cd and reboot, don’t. then open up disk utility and shrink down your mac os x partition so that there is free space between the os x partition and the windows partition. it is important that it goes there, as boot camp expects windows to be the last partition. then put in your windows install cd, reboot, and hold “C” when it turns back on. the windows installer will restart at different points during the installation (once after copying files and once after the final install). every time windows setup reboots your computer, hold the “alt” key as the computer turns on and select your Windows partition (not the windows cd) from the menu that appears. when windows is set up, install the boot camp drivers on your mac os x install disc as per above and then restart into mac os x (do this by holding “alt” at boot and choosing mac os x). then go back into disc utility and create a “MS-DOS (FAT)” partition in the free space, and you should be good to go!

  11. Eric M Says:

    Hi -
    I am new at this and took the plunge and think I messed up along the way – I partioned my iMac drive but didn’t get the Win partion at the end – I was able to keep the linux and osx with refit but I want to start over without removing my osx partion. Is this possible without completely reformating everything? Thanks

  12. Natan Yellin Says:

    Thanks for the excellent guide. Can I follow the same instructions to install Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows 7, and Linux? (Windows 7 instead of Windows Vista.)

  13. HydTech Says:

    Im sure you can but I haven’t tried it. If you do, could you post the results? thanks.

  14. Natan Yellin Says:

    I’m not familiar with EFI at all, so I’m a bit afraid of playing around with things and ending up with an unusable computer. For now I’m probably going to just go for a triple boot environment. (Mac OS X, XP, and Ubuntu.)

    Thanks anyway.

  15. bretquigley Says:

    I’ve been experimenting with using the Windows 7 RC as part of the quadruple boot, and my experience has been as follows: everything works fine until you install Ubuntu, at which point booting Windows 7 from rEFIt results in the message “Error loading operating system”. Interestingly, booting Windows 7 by first choosing to boot Ubuntu in rEFIt and then booting Windows 7 from GRUB results in it loading error-free. The solution that I found for it is to use Winclone to make a backup of Windows 7 before installing Ubuntu (make sure that the “copy generic BCD” option is not selected in preferences, or it will write windows vista boot code). Then, simply restore the image back onto the Windows 7 partition afterwords and it should all work. I’m sure that there’s a better way of doing this (again, it’s able to boot through GRUB, so it’s not completely trashed), but this is the way I found to work.

  16. HydTech Says:

    thanks for that tip. I am also positive there has to be another way but unfortunately I can’t check because I no longer have my macbook.

  17. Natan Yellin Says:

    One more question: Is it possible to shrink OS X’s partition instead of reformatting the entire hard drive?

  18. Natan Yellin Says:

    OK, I’ve done some more reading and now I understand that Windows can only be used with the first four partitions.

    Is it possible to do without the data partition and therefore avoid the need to reformat? If not, perhaps I’ll try to just shrink the Mac OS X partition, add on four other partitions, clone Mac OS X to the last partition, and then reformat the first partition for Vista… Unfortunately, I don’t have a backup hard drive, so I can’t think of an alternative.

  19. HydTech Says:

    its possible but theres a slight chance you might lose data.

  20. Natan Yellin Says:

    I have all of my documents backed up online, so I’m not worried about that- I’d just like to avoid needing to reinstall all of my apps.

    Which is possible- to install without the data partition or to clone the Mac partition?

  21. HydTech Says:

    you can do without the storage partition but you might get the hal.dll error in XP and you might have to tweak it. you can also shrink the OSX partition

  22. joe Says:

    This is a really good guide.

    One question, though. If I only want Vista, Ubuntu, and OS X, can I proceed as the above and just skip the xp parts/partition? I’ve been trying that and everything works perfectly until the last step with ubuntu. It seems that it is trying to boot from my storage partition for some reason. Does this have to do with the fact that when I installed it I typed in (hd0,2) which then installs the boot file to that partition? So if my linux partition is sda6, can I replace the above with (hd0,5)?

  23. HydTech Says:

    you are absolutely correct. grub is trying to load sda3 so you need to change it. you don’t have to reinstall it. before it loads, you can press e to edit and change hd0,2 to hd0,5. once you load ubuntu, you can make a permanent change by editing your menu.lst

  24. joe Says:

    Thanks. It worked.

    I was having trouble since I had two linux penguins that booted, so I went back and wiped everything, thus restarting. I followed everything, this time storing the boot loader to (hd0,5).

    The problem now is that the ubuntu icon boots grub and the windows one as well. They seem to all be pointing to the same place, as when i boot both i get ubuntu. Now I can’t get into windows without setting the timeout back to 10 seconds and then booting into windows, though it works fine if i do that.

    Is there any way to fix the above problem? Thanks.

  25. HydTech Says:

    I really don’t know what you mean, but you might be able to fix grub from within ubuntu

  26. El canardo Says:

    Wwwwoowww !

    What a work !! CONGRATULATIONS !! :-)
    You must have look for a certain time to find out all that !
    I really appreciate the form of your presentation..

    Just 2 questions chief,

    1)-i was wondering if your process could last in this form, even if you decide to uprgade one of the Oses you installed…I mean upgrading an os may destroy the quad boot or no : no risk ??

    2)-i was wondering if you really can make the same Quad boot – replacing Vista by Seven… With the Window 7 current distribution it would be a nice opportunity to test it (Without making a backup of Windows 7 before installing Ubuntu -> I saw the post.. Seems busy to do ;-) .
    May be the Seven message which indicate : “Error loading operating system” just means that You have to reboot on the Seven CD and make a repair and restart action => Like with Vista in your present tuto !!

    ANYWAY YOU REALLY DESERVE ENCOURAGEMENTS !

    P.S : Excuse my english, I haven’t practise for a long time..

    In french I tell you : “BRAVO, superbe travail ! Je vais tout de suite essayer ! Merci pour ton aide précieuse et à très bientot !”

  27. El canardo Says:

    Hey HydTech !
    Are you connected ??

  28. El canardo Says:

    Hello HydTech,

    I’m really in big big trouble vith Vista.. Using your Quadboot method :
    My Installation -> 5 partitions (like your model, EXACTLY)
    1: Vista
    2 : Storage
    3: Xp
    4: Macos (With “SNOW LEOPARD”)
    5 : Free space for Linux (Ubuntu 9.04)

    I explain quicly : I follow your process ; but first of all : Once Vista is installed -> If i try to run it, I’ve got first this message :”Booting GRLRD… Reseting the boot drive….find–set-root /bootmanager.. etc…” and after all these lines Vista starts to run..
    I tried to repair it with the Vista CD, but nothing to do..
    And even if i finish all your process, I can no more run Vista and got this message “BOOTMGR absent.. ctrl+alt+sup to restart..”-> I tried but nothing happens..

    Secondly, and this is strange but My vista partition has been renamed “BOOTCAMP” !!?

    And the third & last point : Very strange too : When I restart and arrive to the Refit menu, if I point to the linux partition : I’m said – i mean its written under the linux logo – that linux is on the storage partition !!!!??!!

    If you would help me please..

    I’ve got a 5,2 MacBookPro – Intel core 2 duo – 2,66 Ghz
    my RAM : 4 Go

  29. HydTech Says:

    are you following the directions?

  30. El canardo Says:

    Hello HydTech and thanks to help me ;-)

    Sure I follow EXACTLY what you teach here. I am on Snow Leopard -> Do you think having Snow leopard cause troubles doing your tuto ??

    What about my Vista installation ? My Vista is not an official version (I mean it’s a pirated one) but I can fully set it up vwith no problems – during the install. : Do you think it’s something to do with that ?

    After researches i understood that when you configure Linux and install it you fix the GRUB to the FAT32 partition -> That’s may be why Linux appears in the Refit menu as bootable from “storage partition”..

    I am very desapointed with all that because i found your tuto verywell made.. I am trying to retry it again..

    ANYWAY if you can help me again man ;. It would be very nice from you. I’m 2d designer.. And if i can help you one day.. Tell me !

  31. HydTech Says:

    i think you should download another Vista and try again.

  32. El canardo Says:

    Ok thank you for you help I’m going to try it.. Thank you very much.

    For the 2 strange points i described :
    1)-My vista partition which has been renamed “BOOTCAMP” !!?
    ->When i created my 5 partitions i gave names with spaces : This may be the cause..

    2)-And IS IT REALLY NORMAL that when I restart and arrive to the Refit menu, I’m said – i mean its written under the linux logo – that linux is on the storage partition ?

    Thank you very much chief for your answer, and have a nice week;-)

  33. El canardo Says:

    Hey HydeTech ?

    Excuse me again but I think i’ve 1 solution for my trouble with linux.. Just have a look on my last post -> 2) :
    I’ve got the same probl than Joe
    ———-
    joe Says:

    September 17, 2009 at 2:20 am
    This is a really good guide.

    “….. and everything works perfectly until the last step with ubuntu. It seems that it is trying to boot from my storage partition for some reason. Does this have to do with the fact that when I installed it I typed in (hd0,2) which then installs the boot file to that partition? So if my linux partition is sda6, can I replace the above with (hd0,5)? ”
    ——
    wITH FOLLOWING YOUR EXACT PARTITION TABLE
    1. Vista (MS-DOS FAT and atleast 10GB)

    2. Storage (MS-DOS FAT and however much space you want as a storage location)

    3. XP (MS-DOS FAT and atleast 7GB)

    4. OSX (Extended Journaled and atleast 20GB)

    5. Free space (Chose from the drop down. will be used for our Ubuntu Linux)

    In the step 7 of ubuntu settings ; Don’t have i to replace (hd0,2) by (hd0,6) TO BE SURE THAT WHEN I POINT TO THE PINGUIN – IN REFIT MENU – I DON’T BOOT FROM MY STORAGE PARTITION ??

    THANK YOU AGAIN !!->I promiss i won’t disturb you after that : Moreover i tested my Vista version : You were right It’s out of order and i ‘m trying with another one :-)

  34. HydTech Says:

    yes, make sure you are installing grub on the right partition

  35. El canardo Says:

    Hello HydTech :-)

    Yes this is exactly the problem :

    I mean WITH YOUR PARTITION TABLE-IN YOUR TUTO (That i followed)-where do you install the GRUB to make the quadboot working nice ?
    On (hd,0) ?
    Or do i have to install it to (hd0,6) ??

    Thank you HydTech ;-)

  36. El canardo Says:

    Hello HydTech EXCUSE I MADE A POSTING ERROR, here’s the answer to the right place ;-)

    Yes this is exactly the problem :

    I mean WITH YOUR PARTITION TABLE-IN YOUR TUTO (That i followed)-where do you install the GRUB to make the quadboot working nice ?
    On (hd,0) ?
    Or do i have to install it to (hd0,6) ??

    Thank you HydTech :-)

  37. HydTech Says:

    Click on advanced and in the drop down box type in (hd0,2)

  38. El canardo Says:

    Hy HydTech ! How are you ? Fine ?

    Well I thank you very much for your answer : So i just Click on advanced and in the drop down box type in (hd0,2) ? And doing so linux (with the pinguin in Refit) will normally boot from his partition.. Ok man

    THANK YOU MUCH ; I RETRY

    SEE YOU AND CONGRATULATIONS !!

  39. El canardo Says:

    Hey chief ?
    By curiosity do you think it’s possible to adapt your partition table to this one :

    5 Partitions from the Volume Scheme. Label them as follows:

    1. Seven (MS-DOS FAT)

    2. Vista (MS-DOS FAT)

    3. XP (MS-DOS FAT)

    4. OSX (Extended Journaled)

    5. Free space (Chose from the drop down. will be used for our Ubuntu Linux)

    ??

    The fourth is always Xp : Wich we mark as active as usual..so no pb !

    And if after the setting of Seven there is a message of a loading error -> Restore by the seven CD !

    The fact we don’t create a data store partition is not a pb anyway if all partitions are read and writen by each 0s !

    AND THIS TIME WE HAVE REALLY ALL THE CURRENT OSES USED IN THE WORLD, ON THE SAME MACHINE.. NO ?

  40. Dual, Triple, Quad Boot a Macbook with Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, and Windows Vista « HydTech Says:

    [...] Quad Boot a Macbook with Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, and Windows Vista moved to http://hydtechblog.com/2009/01/26/dual-triple-quad-boot-a-macbook-with-mac-os-x-ubuntu-linux-windows... Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Lenovo Thinkpad X60 with Fedora 10, openSuse 11, [...]

  41. pesca Says:

    good work! This guide was great help, but one more thing is left.

    I decided to dual boot XP and Tiger on my iMac so I created two partitions. Tiger is working, but xp stops in the installation process at the first restart because some hal.dll file is reported missing or damaged.

    I’ve read the comments above and it looks like I had to create a little partition between tiger and xp, is it possible? Can you suggest me something? Many thanks!

  42. Robert Elkow Says:

    I am trying to quadruple boot a MacPro with four 1 TB hard drives. I want all the operating systems, OSX Snow Leopard, Windows 7 – 64, Windows XP service pack 3, and Ubuntu AMD 64, on the first disk. Half the second disk for NTFS data storage, half the third disk for FAT 32 storage, and half the fourth disk for LINUX storage. I initially divided each disk in half using BOOTCAMP and then used a live Ubuntu CD with gparted to create and reformat the partitions. On disk one partition 3 is for W7, partition 4 is for XP, and partitions 5 to 12 is for Ubuntui. I successfully installed Windows 7, and XP, and could boot into them. I made partition 5, /boot, followed by / and the others for Ubuntu. When it asked where to put GRUB I used the pull down and /dev/sda5. After Ubuntu was installed I restarted the computer and saw the rEFIt icons. No Ubuntu icon! Left to right, an Apple, Windows partition 3, Windows partition 4,legacy OS HD, Windows in partition 3, and Windows in FAT storage. The first two Windows partitions gave me W7 and XP as expected, the remaining 3 gave me XP. No Ubuntu! I then reformated the Linux partitions as ext4 and told GRUB to be installed in ((hd0,4). After reinstalling Ubuntu still no Ubuntu icon. Next to the Apple icon was a windows icon which booted into W7 as before, next legacy OS in partition 4 which led me to the GRUB boot menu with choices to Ubuntu, OSX, W7 in partition 3, and XP in partition 4 and a few others. When I tried to boot XP I got the GRUB menu again. Unable to boot into XP but could boot into W7 and Ubuntu, and I assume OSX, the remainder two icons showed windows and legacy flags, and were labeled Windows partition 3, legacy OS in FAT storage but behaved the same giving me the GRUB menu from which I could not BOOT XP. It looks as if GRUB overwrote partition 4? Although I told it to use partition 5. I attempted to search for GRUB using W7 but could not find it.

    How can I install Ubuntu and get the proper icons on rEFIt and run all four operating systems without having to reinstall the MAC operating system and software?

  43. Robert Elkow Says:

    Please see my my comments above for background information.

    In that explaination I mention that when I boot into Ubuntu other choices come up which include Windows 7 – 64 and Windows xp. When I use the cursor to boot xp I get the GRUB menu again, When I use the cursor to boot Windows 7 it works just fine. I checked the grub.cfg file and compared the command paragraph for Windows 7 and xp. Except for going to different partitions like what I would expect the xp command paragraph has an additional line:

    drivemap -s (hd0) $ (root)

    Can anyone tell me what this means and whether it is causing the problem?

    Should it be changed or eliminated?

    I attempted to create another entry with this line left out but was not permitted to change the file because it was read only. How can I change it?

  44. sean Says:

    I’m currently running on a triple booted mac: snow leopard, ubunutu 9.10, and windows 7. But I want to shrink my snow leopard partition down by 100 Gig and use that extra space to create a data partition that all three OSes can read from and write too. Is there a way to do that without having to reformat my hard drive and start with step 1 in your instruction?

  45. Archie Says:

    Thank you so much for the guide. In my experience so far, everything has worked for installing OSX, Windows 7, and XP. However, once I got to Kubuntu 10.04, rEFIt would report it as “Legacy OS.” I quickly discovered the solution was to update rEFIt. But my new problem is booting Win7. I can boot it through Grub, but any attempt to boot through rEFIt causes the mac to report “Unable to load windows.” Every other OS boots fine from rEFIt. I’m not sure where the issue is, nor do I know enough about linux/grub to attempt to fix it. Any ideas?

  46. djimi Says:

    Desire: OS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard), Windows 7, Windows XP, Ubuntu 9~10

    Thanks for the tutorial – but I’m in the same boat as the previous comments. I installed to (hd0,2) and can’t boot into Linux (9.1) and I don’t even see Windows 7 (My choice instead of Vista) from rEFIt. Robert Elkow are you there? Did you find a solution? What am I doing wrong?

    I thought I was wrong with a step the previous 3 times I started from scratch, but this time I made sure I followed it precisely. I did and it doesn’t work. Anybody with a better link or tutorial for a QUAD BOOT macbook, with current bootcamp drivers etc.?

    Thanks for the help

  47. bob Says:

    Trying win7 instead of vista:

    installed upto and including winxp. Rebooted before doing any ubuntu stuff and went into OSX. Rebooted and went into Win7 and got “error loading operating system” error.

    ps. my macbook cd drive is not supported by rEFIt so i had to install off cd using C key on keyboard rather than selecting cd in boot menu.

  48. Grandblabla Says:

    Once more: Great, great work for that tutorial! The way to make the install is clean so far and as easiest as possible, compar to many other tutorial I found!

    Unfortunatly for me, i’m stuck with the same problem as Archie excepted that I’m using Ubuntu 10.04… And no solution found yet!
    Any idea?

  49. Andy Says:

    Great tutorial, something I’ve been looking for a while.

    I successfully got to the 3rd operating system installed correctly.

    However on following the instructions for installing Ubuntu, that seems to have messed up & now one of the operating systems has disappeared from the initial rEFIt boot menu & Ubuntu doesn’t boot up!

    I’ve tried to go back to Mac osx to remove the linux Swap space, but its not letting me remove or delete it to start again.

    I have spent hours on it, don’t want to start from scratch again!

    I had:

    Win7
    Storage
    Win Xp
    Mac Osx
    Free Space

    The version of ubuntu I installed is the latest one out from their site 10.0.4
    http://www.ubuntu.com/

    Any help would be welcome.

    Thanks.

    husky2@inbox.com

  50. Chris Adams Says:

    This was perfect! Thanks a lot. This replaced the hours of trying and failing that I did on my own. Great screenshots and instructions. My WinXP sector became corrupted and would not boot the other day but the Windows 7 sector did automatic repairs on it when I booted into 7. Pretty cool!

  51. Where do I install the GRUB loader to on a Quad Boot Install? Says:

    [...] site regarding a QUAD boot on a Macbook Pro. This is my 2nd attempt. As I followed this thread: http://hydtechblog.com/2009/01/26/du…windows-vista/ If anyone can quickly have a look & see if the instructions here make sense, as I've been [...]

  52. Andrew Says:

    This was a life saver. I had managed to get a dual boot and triple boot on my macbook pro ages ago but just got a new SSD and spend about 2 days researching installing SL on MBR disc and all other problems.

    In the end it was so simple!! Thank you!

  53. New quad boot MacBook Pro with i7 and SSD is fast « Life & Code Says:

    [...] still slightly trailing my now-aging desktop’s Core i7 950. Along the way I found a great MacBook Pro quad boot guide (complete with loads of pictures) which is similar to the strategy I used to triple boot my last [...]

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