[ktbos]

Brilliant work here; thanks for the great guide! I was able to adapt it to my setup for a Dell Laptop and wrote a guide for my E6410 crediting the work here.

I do have one question.. I'm having problems with WGA. I don't have an authenticity problem (I used the Dell provided DVD and don't have nongenuine warnings) but when I try to download software from Microsoft, the WGA tool crashes with "Error". Hours on the phone with Microsoft (where I did not mention the triple boot setup) have gotten me nowhere. I'm wondering if anyone else that has done this setup has a WGA crash and if so, any suggestions for what about the setup causes it?

(BTW, I did a test reinstall of Win7 with no triple boot setup and WGA runs fine so it's either something with the triple boot or something else went wrong during that install.)

[ZeusDream]

Hello there

Great Guide!! Im having one issue... My computer is starting with Grub and NO with Chameleon Bootloader. What im doing wrong? I follow step by step this guide...

Ohh, and with GRUB OSX no start.

Thanks for your help.

[uzumaki]

Is there a way to specify Windows 7 as the default OS to boot? OSX isn't for me.

[magichand]

i think its time for me to put in a little reply on this wonderful tutorial. Basically the steps i used were almost the same...except im using different hardware...no netbook but just an ordinary laptop HP Probook 4410s.

Well, come to my journey of making my laptop available with triple boot, i tested this method with MBR, all went fine even there was a little hiccup in between but i managed to google out the solution.

Come to GPT method, since i am not using netbook, so then surely i am not using either of the netbook installer or netbookbootmaker.

Steps almost the same,

Launch the OSX installer and have the Disk Utility to the partitioning to GPT way...created 3 partitions (since creating 4 partition will be a waste as Windows wont recoqnize it). By the way, i am not using the retail Snow Leopard installer but using the iATKOS S3 for Intel based machines.

Installed OSX and customized as desired.

When comes to installing Windows 7, i came across with "Windows cannot be installed to the disk..bla bla bla..". This got me stucked for a while..but luckily my itchy fingers played around with Diskpart which comes a long with the installer. I did the following:-

diskpart
list disk
select disk 0
list partition
select partition 2 (partition with most space for my Windows 7)
format fs=ntfs quick
select partition 1 (partititon which created automatically for System Reserved)
active
exit
exit
then restart machine
relaunch Windows 7 installer (USB or DVD)
Installation went smooth as it should be and restart, customized as needed.

come to installation on uBuntu, this one pretty straight forward.
just a small note to Anguish, installing uBuntu without bootloader wont work as Chameleon wont be able to detect it later on. Leave it to what suggested by Anguish, to install the bootloader into /dev/sda4 (partition for uBuntu)

Okie dokie, all installation done and now machine is completely not bootable.

comes to repairing windows, doing it in GPT partition format on my machine didnt go anywhere as its saying "The version of System Recovery is not the same with the Windows that i want to repair"..not exactly the error message but something like that..

luckily i read thru this thread from beginning to the end and with the help of GPTSYNC, i dont have to repair my windows. Just run that gptsync /dev/sda from either OSX or uBuntu, solved my problem. the only thing changed, partitioning system no more fully GPT but mix of MBR, GPT Hibrid and GPT.

the only thing that makes me a bit not comfortable is when seeing swap partition for uBuntu being recoqnized by Windows 7 as unallocated disk space and it appears to be another "Localdisk" in Windows Explorer.

other than that, honestly, this tutorial is just excellent starting for anyone out there wants to build their own triple boot system. Maybe my reply a bit late..but i think i've ventured to almost all kind of problems just to reach my goal of a triple boot system.

[foilrat]

Many thanks to all...

Anguish for the excellent guide,
nvrmoor100 for the guide about using gptsync.

I wasn't able to get around the dread "Windows 7 0xc000000e boot error" until I used the gptsync.

I'm now booting 10.6.3, Win7 and UNB10.4

Many thanks, all.

[Flint]

Just wanted to add my thanks - I very much appreciate your time in writing up the tutorial.

First attempt failed, because I was trying to be too clever by creating an extra partition for shared data. Second attempt succeeded because I followed the guide.

I'll leave the "extra partition for shared data" for another day.

Matthew

[garrett]

You definitely have to be careful of partitions, since it's a MBR/GPT hybrid. I had tried this guide with the partitions in a different order, and that didn't work. Took me a long time to track it down to a GPT issue

Somehow my linux partition stopped booting a while back, so I'm reinstalling. I'm highly suspicious of the special bootloader in NBI 0.8.4 RC1. I just re-followed the guide and ran into issues partway through (windows was unwilling to fix itself). I'm gonna retry with with NBI 0.8.3 and see if that improves things.

[sylmini]

Great walk through. I was able to get windows 7, osx and backtrack4 (ubuntu) installed. It was a bit confusing and nerve racking trying to get all 3 os's to boot properly.

After I had them booting properly, I used clonezilla to image my 120GB drive to an external hard drive. (I didn't want to go through all these steps again, if something messed up my boot system.) I found myself messing around with the ubuntu installation again and kaboom, my partitions got messed up. I was able to restore my hard drive in about 40 minutes using clonezilla. Great tool !! One word of advise, update the osx to 10.6.4, do the necessary updates to windows 7 and then create the clonezilla image.

---------- Post added at 03:36 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:24 AM ----------

Originally Posted by garrett

You definitely have to be careful of partitions, since it's a MBR/GPT hybrid. I had tried this guide with the partitions in a different order, and that didn't work. Took me a long time to track it down to a GPT issue

Somehow my linux partition stopped booting a while back, so I'm reinstalling. I'm highly suspicious of the special bootloader in NBI 0.8.4 RC1. I just re-followed the guide and ran into issues partway through (windows was unwilling to fix itself). I'm gonna retry with with NBI 0.8.3 and see if that improves things.

I too had problems trying to run the repair on windows 7. If you went through the steps to activate the windows 7 partition, then you have to restart the windows 7 boot usb before running the repair. Also, when you are given the choice to fix the partition, I pulled out my windows 7 usb as it was writing the fix to the usb partition instead of the hard drive partition.

I also had to deviate a little from these steps. I first installed osx, then windows 7, then ubuntu. But for some reason ubuntu seemed to mess up my windows 7. So I ended up booting up into osx and formatting the win7 partition as fat (ubuntu was still installed.) Then boot up using windows 7 boot usb, start the installation procedure. Format the fat partition as NTFS. After this point windows kept giving me some type of message saying it can't install win7 to this partition. I had to reboot the computer and get back to this screen and then it would proceed with the installation.

All I can say is, once you have all 3 os' booting properly, use clonezilla to create an image. (It will save you the headache of trying to get these 3 os up and running again if you run into any problems in the future.)

[garrett]

As far as I can tell, I've confirmed my hypothesis. The bootloader included in NBI/bootmaker 0.8.3 works, where 0.8.4 RC1 doesn't. Exactly the same process failed with 0.8.4 RC1.

[majidbhurgri]

Originally Posted by foilrat

Many thanks to all...


I wasn't able to get around the dread "Windows 7 0xc000000e boot error" until I used the gptsync.

I'm now booting 10.6.3, Win7 and UNB10.4

Many thanks, all.

Twice I have been plagued by this dreaded error and had to start over again. Now I have installed 10.6.3 and Win7 and waiting to add UDT10.04.

Can someone PLEASE explain to this noob how to use gptsync in OSX or Ubuntu? I need a walkthrough and not just general advice. Will you please help?