The Steussy Ranch

It took a couple of days, but it’s up and running again. For those of a certain age, we remember the articles in Byte magazine by Jerry Pournelle. He tried to get all manner of technologies to work, with endless disappointments. His articles were funny in an “I’ve been there” sort of way.

First of all, Snow Leopard appears to be too new to have many folk interested in installing a new Triple Boot (OS X, Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP) on it. An upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard preserves a rEFIt installed Triple Boot, so it appears very few people have tried it. My situation (a new hard disk supplied by Apple during a repair) necessitated rebuilding.

None of the websites with instructions appeared to work. The one that came closest was located here. However, when installing Windows XP there was a curious fault. It would install just fine up to the first reboot. After that, the screen would display “Setup complete in 39 minutes”, the disks would run at intervals and nothing would happen for 2 to 3 hours until I physically rebooted the system.

I confirmed that this was a software error rather than a hardware fault by running the standard Bootcamp installation, which went OK. Unfortunately, the standard installation breaks down if you add a partition for Linux, so back to the drawing board.

I happen to have a disk image of my previously working Windows XP installation. I followed instructions on this website. They didn’t quite work for me. Here was my successful process:

• Starting items: Macbook Pro (version 2.1, Santa Rosa chipset), Windows XP Professional with SP2 DVD, rEFIt downloaded and installed on Macbook, previously installed Windows XP disc image on an external hard drive, Ubuntu startup ISO downloaded and burned on a disc.

1. Boot into OS X and Applications->Utilities->Disk Utility to create partitions for Linux (14GB as HFS+) and Windows (18GB as FAT32).
2. Reboot into rEFIt (previously installed). Run Partition Manager (icon at bottom of rEFIt main screen) to automatically sync MBR and GUID.
3. Insert and boot from the Windows XP Pro SP2 disc.
4. Install to the FAT32 partition until the first reboot (after partition selection and copying files to disk).
5. Reboot brings you into rEFIt. From there boot into OS X
6. Restore backup disc image to the FAT32 partition, overwriting all files currently there using Disk Utility (30 minutes)
7. Reboot into the restored Windows partition (failed)
8. Reboot into the Windows XP Pro SP2 CD and run Recovery Console
9. Run BOOTCFG /REBUILD and BOOTCFG /ADD to readjust the boot.ini file to the current setup.
10. Reboot into the Windows partition.
11. It works!

The Linux installation is easy in comparison. Just remember, no swap disk and to install GRUB into the Linux partition.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 8:11 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.