Comments on: Macbook Triple-Boot with OSX Leopard, Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04

By: Boot Boot Boot « dare not accepted.

Boot Boot Boot « dare not accepted. — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:14:34 +0000

[...] the triple boot via Boot Camp on the original 640GB hard drive (roughly following the advice found here), I found that the partition table had been changed at some point from GUID (my suspicion is I made [...]

By: Dark Liquid

Dark Liquid — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:02:01 +0000

Well, if a shared data partition is all your looking for, I use OSX as my shared data partition With the snow leopard boot camp drivers for windows, it can mount the hfs+ filesystem, as can linux, so they can all use that.

I don’t recall having any issues what so ever having 4 partitions (OSX, Linux, swap, Win7) in addition to ‘the weird apple one’ which is the EFI partition I believe. I do however have chunks of free space between each of my partitions of about 50-100mb each, not sure why but that’s how OSX insisted on partitioning it so I’m assuming it was to do with the EFI system – I wouldn’t recommend trying to reclaim it or doing any partition under linux/windows.

By: Stephen Byerley

Stephen Byerley — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:20:08 +0000

Hi, thanks for this guide! I’m reading up in preparation for the arrival of my brand new 13in MacBook Pro. Other triple-boot guides warn that you can only have four partitions (weird apple partition, OS X, Linux, Windows), prohibiting a swap partition. You don’t seem to have had that problem…can you shed any light on this?
(I’m not actually worried about swap, but I was thinking of having a shared data partition–any thoughts?)

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:57:33 +0000

I’m not sure what I did with the boot loader when I installed ubuntu I can’t remember if there were any options as to where to install it. Any how, I wiped everything and reinstalled osx and now I’m pretty much where I was before I started all this. Not sure if I want to try this again any time soon. But thank you so much for your help.

By: Dark Liquid

Dark Liquid — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:43:02 +0000

Hmm, not sure what is going on there. When you installed the Ubuntu installation you made sure to select to install the bootloader on the same partition as the main linux partition and didn’t let the installer mess around with any of the existing partitions, right? That’s all I can think might have caused it.

If you installed the bootloader onto the MBR, you probably want to uninstall it. I’m guessing here though and any suggestions I have might just make things worse, so bear that in mind.

As far as I am aware you can’t actually uninstall the bootloader, just overwrite it so I expect you’ll want to let the Win7 tools do that. I have no idea how to actually fix bootloader problems with Win7 but I imagine booting off of the win7 install disk and using it to boot the installed win7 system should allow you to repair the win7 install or it might magically offer some way to fix it itself once booted or from within the cd boot menu.

Assuming that is done and you can reach th epoint where you can boot into the win7 partition (and your osx partition still works) you can try reinstalling the bootloader in linux but make 100% sure you do not install it into the MBR but instead install it onto the partition the actual linux root fs is on. You may also need to edit your grub config.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:33:24 +0000

Crap, now Win7 doesn’t boot anymore either, it just sits there at the gray windows flag icon and not doing a thing.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:30:40 +0000

Back again… I got Ubuntu installed and it worked but I think after I installed all the system updates and tried to reboot, all I get now the grub command line when I choose to boot into Ubuntu.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:33:56 +0000

Hmmm… ok I guess I’ll have to try that. Thanks so much for your help and quick replies.

By: Dark Liquid

Dark Liquid — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:05:46 +0000

You may notice I updated the post regarding this. Installing the snow leopard prerelease boot camp drivers solve pretty much all power management and brightness control issues and I’ve found linux runs more or less the same as OSX regarding power management after I followed all the instructions on the article I linked to regarding running ubuntu on the macbook.

Yes, there is an element of risk here, I can’t promise you that your mac won’t burst into flames but I’ve been running mine fine for quite a while now and my mac seems to survive running for several hours in either linux or win7 without incident on my 3 year old hardware.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:39:34 +0000

Ok I finally got the thing running BUT I noticed 2 big problems. 1. You can’t adjust the brightness, its stuck on the brightest setting. 2. The system runs hot. Although running Win7 works on a MacBook, I don’t think I want to risk damaging my system by running it with these problems. Have you or anyone else been able to solve this? I’m assuming that I’m going to have the same problem when I try to install Ubuntu. Should I even bother trying?