Partitioning On A Mac

[GuitarmanMCS]

Hello everyone,

I have a question and it may sound quite bizarre. I am interested in installing Vista, XP, OSX and Linux on my MacBook. I know this probably sounds odd, but I want to be able to boot all four OS. What is the easiest way to do this? I know that Bootcamp only allots for one partition of either XP or Vista and I really dislike Parallels Desktop as it runs annoyingly slow.

Is there a way for this to be done? I figured that the easiest way is probably to partition my harddrive four ways (giving the largest portion to OSX obviously). Am I correct in thinking this? Also, will I be able to install Linux and two versions of Windows in these partitions?

Is there any way to partition without wiping out OSX?

Any advice?

 

[GuitarmanMCS]

Anyone???

 

[webgoat]

i have vista installed with leopard boot camp and run xp pro and linux ubuntu along with my vista bc partition with vmware fusion

 

[JNB]

Leopard allows for partitioning on the fly in Disk Utility, but limits the formats for each partition. iPartition may also be of use to you (particularly as it supports a huge variety of formats and partition tables), but I don't know if it's deemed completely "Leopard-friendly" as yet.

Parallels (or any VM solution) is only annoyingly slow if burdened with insufficient processor power or RAM. Recent benchmarks have shown it faster than Fusion in most tasks, and even faster than XP in Boot Camp in a few tasks. I use it regularly on a MacBook 2.16, giving it 756MB-1GB of RAM, and it runs perfectly fine - faster than my company-issued Dell.

 

[m1ss1ontomars]

No easy way to do this without wiping out Mac OS X. Look for an article named Triple Boot via Boot Camp; that should help you a lot.

 

[Rizvi1]

I myself wanted to be able to use Leopard, Tiger, and XP on my recently purchased 15" 2.2ghz MBP SR. So when I installed Leopard, I partitioned 89.9GB for it (Mac OS Extended (Journaled)), 14.9 GB for Tiger (also Mac OS Extended (Journaled)), and 6.6GB for Windows (MS-DOS (FAT32)) format.

I was ready to install Win XP w/ Service Pack 2 today on that Windows partition via the bootcamp assistant, but it seems the bootcamp assistant doesn't let you do anything if you've already partitioned. So I'll try to install directly onto that 6.6GB partition via the Windows XP disc tomorrow. Hopefully that'll work ok.

 

[m1ss1ontomars]

I myself wanted to be able to use Leopard, Tiger, and XP on my recently purchased 15" 2.2ghz MBP SR. So when I installed Leopard, I partitioned 89.9GB for it (Mac OS Extended (Journaled)), 14.9 GB for Tiger (also Mac OS Extended (Journaled)), and 6.6GB for Windows (MS-DOS (FAT32)) format.

I was ready to install Win XP w/ Service Pack 2 today on that Windows partition via the bootcamp assistant, but it seems the bootcamp assistant doesn't let you do anything if you've already partitioned. So I'll try to install directly onto that 6.6GB partition via the Windows XP disc tomorrow. Hopefully that'll work ok.

Of course it will work ok. In Leopard, the Boot Camp assistant only partitions the drive, and since you already did that, there was nothing left for it to do. The Leopard DVD has the drivers on it.