I made a lot of mistake before I got it mix right.
Originally I had osx with no boot camp installed. So I thought I'd make a new partition using disk utility and then install the windows xp I had. My plan was to have it become upgraded to windows seven. Once I created the fat partition, I popped in the xp disk and restarted. The the blue screen showed up and asked me to partition or leave it alone. I chose to leave it alone since it was already partitioned as FAT32. The computer restarted and instead of going to start up, the computer told me to press "ANY" key to start from disk. I pressed buttons and found myself back at the partition selection. It was like deja vu since I had just been here. I selected the option to partition the FAT. I had thought that maybe it required a reformat. I chose this option because it was 32 GB in size; he same size of my FAT partition. Little did I know, that it would wipe my entire HD. Windows installed normally. I discovered my mistake when I tried booting up mac. it was gone.....I was momentarily horrified but was soon relieved upon realizing that I still had dropbox. Oh, trusty drop box. This is the reason I use you in the first place! Ive had a history of reinstalls and drop box had been there to make getting my precious files back more painless. The only sacrifice would be time.
I had to pull up my old snow leopard install disk since Lion was out there somewhere and i probably couldn't get it back until I downloaded it again from the app store. SL installed normally and I was able to redownload LION from the app store. lion installed normally.
since everything was fresh, it would be a good time to make a partition. 3 partitions to be exact. I wanted ubuntu and windows 7. I added windows and installed it. was able to load both osx and windows.
Then I created a new partition for the ubuntu. Unfortuanately, windows refused to work. all I did was add a partition. I didn't even install ubuntu. So then I thought maybe, I need to make 3 partitions in the beginning. So i resized osx, and added two FAT partitions. One for windows and one for ubuntu. I started with windows 7....again....and it installed alright. then i tried ubuntu. Set up was painless but the install method was weird. I chose the option to install ubuntu along side osx. It took me to a slider that asked me how much space to put into this and into that. The problem was that I had no idea what these two pieces were for! 50-50 seemed appropriate. I had thought that I would find myself with the option of which partition to install ubuntu in, but I was not graced with such an option. It started installing without hesitation. osx and ubuntu were good, but win seven was gone..... =_____=
disk utility revealed that ubuntu wrote itself right on TOP of of windows 7. Nice... thank you ubuntu... thank you....
back to square one. two fat partitions. install ubuntu first and be more careful about how to install it in the right partition. No luck. Had the bright idea to make one FAT partition and one FREE SPACE partition. ubuntu seized that space without asking me anything. The good thing was that it filled out that entire partition for its own; which was exactly what I was shooting for.
now for windows. installed it normally. but ubuntu disappeared.. so I reinstalled it... then win 7 disappeared. so i reinstalled it... and then ubuntu disappeared AGAIN! GOSH was i tired of this....
Did some searching for a solution and many people used this THING called rEFIt.
oh did I mention that my recovery disk disappeared too? Yeah, the one that lets you reinstalled lion. If this were to crash that I'd have to install everything starting from SL all over again, so as a precaution I burned lion on to a dvd-r. It took longer to load up, but worth it. after all, how often would I find myself in this position?
rEFIt was a painless install. there was a nice script that installed it automatically. I restarted the computer and poof! all the partitions are there!!!!! Ya know how one of them was missing? well, REFIT made it visible! and it worked!!!!
The only problem was that by default, the machine started up with grub recovery and once it got there I had no clue what to do except restart. After a while I got fed up with always manually choosing OSX as a start up disk.
The refit.config file has the commands needed to choose mac as start up by default.
i.e. "default_selection M"
I found it funny how if I selected ubuntu or windows they both would lead to GNU GRUB which gave me options to start up start up as ubuntu , osx, or windows. a bit redundant, don't ya think? I'll try finding a way to fix it, but for now I'm happy.
below is a quick guide on how to triple partition your mac osx.
1) installed osx on the entries disk if you haven't already.
2)use boot camp to get windows support software. NOT NOT USE BOOT CAMPTO INSTALL WINDOWS
3)use disk utility and make two partitions. One shall be FAT32 and the other shall be free space.
3.5) download and install rEFIt
4) install windows on the fat32. You may need to format it to ntfs
5)install ubuntu and choose the option to install along side osx and it will take up the entire free space partition.
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