![]() ![]() ![]() I created a 67-ish GB root partition (mounted as “/”) and another partition for swap. I told Ubuntu that I wanted to customize my partition layout rather than letting it set things up automatically. The live USB drive took forever to boot and everything was extremely slow while it was booted, but it seemed to work OK. So I booted from it and installed Ubuntu 13.04. It’s not necessary if you simply burn a CD, and I think newer Intel Macs are more compatible with normal USB boot disks.Īfter doing this, rEFIt was able to boot the USB drive. So I basically manually created the live USB image with a process similar to what was described in this blog post–formatting my full USB drive as FAT32 with no partition table, copying everything over, renaming isolinux to syslinux, and then running syslinux. Essentially, older Intel Macs (mine is a 17″ MacBook Pro with Core Duo processor) will not boot from a live USB disk unless you format the whole disk as FAT32 instead of making a partition table with a single FAT32 partition. I would probably recommend creating an Ubuntu 13.04 boot CD, but I was actually able to boot from a USB drive that I manually created. Dunno, but anyway, then I was ready to continue with about 70 GB of space remaining between my OS X and Windows XP partitions. It’s also possible that simply rebooting allowed a few files to be moved around that otherwise weren’t able to be moved. Not sure exactly what fixed it, but the zero file couldn’t have hurt. After that, Disk Utility was able to successfully resize my OS X partition. Finally I rebooted into single user mode, ran “fsck -y” to ensure the disk had no errors (and indeed it was fine so I don’t think this did anything to help), and then booted into the full OS X. This still didn’t help Disk Utility succeed though. This caused warnings which I ignored until dd quit due to the disk being full. I don’t know for sure if this fixed it or not, but I used dd in the Terminal to fill the rest of my Mac OS X partition with a file full of zeros: dd if=/dev/zero of=zerofile Disk Utility took forever and finally complained saying that it was having trouble shrinking the disk. So I used Disk Utility (well, tried to use Disk Utility) to shrink my OS X partition to a size of about 177 GB after clearing some space. I just needed to shrink my Mac OS X partition to make room for extra partitions in between. I don’t know if that’s true, but conveniently, Windows was already at the end of the disk. ![]() I read all about setting up a Mac for triple-booting, and it seemed pretty clear that Windows likes to be the last partition on the hard drive. I knew I’d need it for booting Ubuntu though, so it’s best to make sure it’s installed and working before continuing on. I also had rEFIt installed, but it wasn’t really necessary at the time since I was only booting Mac OS X and Windows. The first EFI Protective partition has to be there, so that only leaves three free slots to put partitions accessible to non-GPT-compatible operating systems such as Windows XP. EFI Protective partition - about 200 MBĪs you may know, the GPT and MBR partition tables are set up in a “hybrid” approach with Boot Camp that allows older operating systems like Windows XP to still access up to three partitions despite lacking support for GPT.I had started with a full OS X install and then used Boot Camp to install Windows XP. Both of these operating systems were working perfectly. I started out with a working install of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and Windows XP, which I had previously installed using Boot Camp. ![]() Without further adieu, I will describe my setup from start to finish. A lot of what I did was driven by other people’s wiki articles and blog posts, particularly this excellent blog about manually editing partitions. I ran into a few problems so I’d like to share what I did to make it all work. This weekend, I finally decided to try to set up my MacBook Pro to boot into OS X, Windows XP, and Ubuntu. ![]()
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