Triple boot - Mac OS X, Windows XP & Ubuntu Linux on Intel PC

Okay! You decided to have three OS on your machine. After experimenting with various procedures, this worked well for me. Here are the steps:

Note: This procedure involves re-partioning your system, hence you would lose your data. Please BACKUP your data before you try any of these.
I. Instal Mac OS X 10.4

  • Boot your machine with Mac CD. From the Disk Utilities menu, make 3 partitions. I created partitions with sizes 16GB for Mac, 8GB for Windows and 13GB for Ubuntu.
  • Format Mac partition with Mac OS X journaled, Windows partition with NTFS and Linux partition with Linux types.
  • Instal Mac OS X on Mac partition.

II. Instal Windows

  • Insert windows CD, make sure you select the windows partition.
  • Just follow the instructions and complete the installation.

III. Instal Ubuntu Linux

  • Restart the machine with Ubuntu Feisty CD.
  • Select the linux partition. You may also need to create a 1GB partition for swap
  • Follow instructions and complete installation.

Now restart the system. GRUB starts and you will have options to choose Ubuntu and Windows. But where is Mac option? Don’t panic! Log into Ubuntu. Add the following entry to /boot/grub/menu.lst

title Mac OS X (Tiger)
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Restart now. Hopefully you now have options to choose all three OS.

5 Responses to “Triple boot - Mac OS X, Windows XP & Ubuntu Linux on Intel PC”

  1. Anhbdh Says:

    I have tried this thousands times and no use, MAC OS couldn’t start up.

  2. Mano Says:

    As mentioned in the post, you need to update /boot/grub/menu.lst. If you did that, let me know the entries you have there.

  3. Anhbdh Says:

    Of course, I did changed the grub. To make sure I will tell you about my configuration:

    I have two HDDs: 1 Maxtor 40GB and 1 Hitachi 160GB.

    The Hitachi is labeled as Data for storage.

    The Maxtor has three partitions: first for windows, second for MAC and third for FC 8.

    And here for the Windows and MAC. Windows boot normally but not for MAC.

    title Windows XP
    root (hd0,0)
    chainloader +1

    title Mac OS X86
    root (hd0,1)
    chainloader +1

  4. Jim Says:

    What are you using to format? You can’t format NTFS with Disk Utililies?

  5. Mano Says:

    It doesn’t matter it this case. Here, we are starting from scratch. Remove all partitions, format and repartition. Disk Utility will not erase NTFS, but can remove it

Leave a Reply

Spam protection by WP Captcha-Free