January17

Multi-Boot and Multi-OS on Mac Pro - the best way.

Tags: , , , , | Categories: Apple | Mac OSX | PC Building | Windows 7 | Windows Vista | Windows XP
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Being a total PC geek, I have always been anti-mac.   This is to say, of course, until I joined the iPhone bandwagon and started development for the iPhone, which requires Mac Hardware.  Now that Mac hardware is all intel based, however, I find myself still falling back to Windows installs as often as possible.  And now that I have seen how incredibly any operating system runs on my Dual Quad Core 2.8Ghz Mac Pro with dual video cards, 16-gb of RAM, and four 1TB Western Digital Black 1TB hard drives, I am truly enjoying mac hardware Cool.

 

Traditionally, Apple has provided a Boot Camp installer - which is a great tool when you want to share a single drive to run multiple operating systems.  Boot camp will shrink your OSX partition, create a landing spot for your favorite flavor of windows and then kick off the installer for you.  What you get in the end is a PC with a single drive that contains multiple partitions - one of which will be your "default" OS, and the other which can be selected for restart using the boot camp manager or can be picked on the fly by holding down the OPTION key as the mac starts up.

 

As I have illustrated in an earlier article, all of this hubbub is totally un-necessary on the Mac Pro.  The Mac Pro is a standard EFI PC, and can boot straight off of the windows installer disk just as well as it can the Mac OS installer disk.  Additionally, the Mac Pro is the only PC (thus far) in the Apple lineup that supports multiple hard drives - four, to be exact.

 

In this article - I will walk you through creating the ultimate geek set up - modeled after my own Mac Pro, quad booting Mac OSX, Windows XP 64-bit, Windows Vista 64-bit, and Windows 7 64-bit.   I will assume that you already have install disks for each of these operating systems, you have four bare drives - all of which have been installed in the Mac Pro's drive Caddies.  At the present time, do not place the caddies into the Mac Pro - we'll do that one at a time.

 

  1. Install the first bare drive into bay 1 (closest to the front) - we'll use this one for Mac OSX
  2. Power the Mac Pro up, eject the DVD drive, and insert the Mac OSX disc 1 into the drive.  If the machine gives you an error because it cannot find a boot device, simply restart again once the CD is inserted.
  3. The Mac Pro should boot straight off of the install CD - but I always recommend holding the C key as soon as you power up the machine, which will force a boot from the DVD drive.
  4. Install Mac OSX
  5. When Mac OSX has completely finished installing, eject the installer DVD and replace it with the Windows XP-64 bit install DVD.  Close the drive tray and power off the machine.
  6. Gently pull out the Mac OS Hard Drive located in Bay One just far enough so that it is no longer connected to the motherboard - 1/2" should be fine.  Fully install your second bare hard drive into the second bay.
  7. Power up the machine and hold down the C key to boot from the Windows XP DVD you placed in the drive in step 5.
  8. Follow the instructions to install Windows XP 64-bit on the machine.  The system will restart many times.  If the setup application fails to successfully boot and resume the installation process, restart the machine and hold down the Option key.  Pick the Hard Drive Icon to boot from the hard drive and resume the install.
  9. Once Windows XP has completely finished installing, eject the installer DVD from the drive and replace it with the Vista 64-bit DVD.  If the Vista Installer begins running, exit and then shutdown the machine.
  10. Gently pull out the XP64 hard drive located in bay two just far enough so that it is no longer connected to the motherboard - 1/2" should be fine.  Fully install your third bare hard drive into the third bay.
  11. Power up the machine and hold down the C key to boot from the Vista DVD you placed in the drive in step 9.
  12. Follow the instructions to install Windows Vista on the machine.  The system will restart many times.  If the setup application fails to successfully boot and resume the installation process, restart the machine and hold down the Option key.  Pick the Hard Drive Icon to boot from the hard drive and resume the install.
  13. Once Vista has installed successfully, eject the installer DVD from the drive and replace it with the Windows 7 installer DVD.  If the Windows 7 installer begins, exit and then shutdown the machine.
  14. Genlty pull out the Vista hard drive located in bay three just far enough so that it is no longer connected to the motherboard - 1/2" should be fine. Fully install your fourth bare hard drive into the fourth bay.
  15. Power up the machine and hold down the C key to boot from the Windows 7 DVD you placed in the drive in step 13.
  16. Follow the instructions to install Windows 7 on the machine.  The system will restart many times.  If the setup application fails to successfully boot and resume the installation process, restart the machine and hold down the Option key.  Pick the Hard Drive Icon to boot from the hard drive and resume the install.
  17. Once Windows 7 has installed correctly, eject the installer DVD from the drive and close the tray.
  18. Power down the machine.
  19. Push all of the hard drives completely into their bays and close the Mac Pro case.
 
 
This completes installing all of the Operating Systems on your machine.  At this point, Mac OSX should boot by default, and you can pick any of the other Windows installations by holding the ALT key during the boot sequence.  You're not done yet.  One of the things that could cause a problem at this point is that Mac OS will be able to see all of the Windows Partitions, and each of the Windows partitions will be able to see each of the other Windows partitions.  This doesn't actually create a problem right off the bat - but if any of the partitions are edited by one of the other operating systems either inadvertently or on purpose, you could end up with a system that won't boot.
 
 
The solution - we want to boot each of the windows partitions and remove the drive letters pointing to the other windows installs.  Once we're finished with that, we'll want to boot up Mac OSX and edit the /etc/fstab (File Systems Table) to tell it not to mount the windows partitions automatically.  The process for this is simple:
 
 
On the Windows Partitions:
 
  • Boot into Windows (XP, then Vista, then 7)
  • Assuming you only have one DVD Drive in your Mac Pro - you'll notice that the hard drive representing your current active OS will be your C: drive, your DVD drive will be your D: drive, and then you will also see an E: and F: drive representing the other two Windows installations.
  • We want to make sure that the E: and F: drive no longer appear.
  • Right click My Computer and then click Manage
  • Click on Disk Management
  • Find the first hard drive partition after your DVD-ROM drive (most likely E:).  Right click the area containing the drive letter, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
  • Click the Drive Letter, Click Remove, Click OK on the "warning" and then click OK again.
  • Find the second hard drive partition after your DVD-ROM drive (most likely F).  Right click the area containing the drive letter, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths
  • Click the Drive Letter, Click Remove, Click OK on the "warning" and then click OK again.
  • Close Computer Management.
  • Reboot the PC, boot the next windows installation, and repeat the same steps.  Do this for Windows Vista AND Windows 7.
 
These steps will ensure that your windows installations do not inadvertently step on one another.
 
 
On Mac OS X:
  • Open a terminal window.
  • At the prompt, type "sudo pico /etc/fstab" and press enter
  • Enter your password.  This is a UNIX based text editor.  Depending on your OS version, this file will most likely be blank.  If there are already entries in here, scroll to the bottom of the file and put your cursor in the first column of a new line.
  • Open Disk Manager
  • Once Disk Manager populates all volume information, you should see a tree view with four drives.  Underneath each of the drives there will be individual partitions.
  • The first drive is Mac OSX, we don't want to do anything with this one.
  • The second drive is Windows XP 64-bit.  There should be one partition on this drive.  Click the partition, then press command-I to get information.
  • You will notice a "Universal Unique Identifier" - this is a GUID that identifies that partition.  Expand the window so that you can see the entire number and copy it to the clipboard by hilighting it and pressing command-C.
  • Go back to your terminal window - enter the following line "UUID=<PASTE YOUR IDENTIFIER HERE> none auto ro,noauto" - the first line will look something like this "UUID=E4545B84-D5B9-46EF-AD91-802433AAD41C none auto ro,noauto"
  • Repeat the same thing by pasting the identifiers for the partitions on the remaining two drives much like you did in the previous steps.  When you are finished, you should have one line for each partition you want to HIDE from Mac OSX.
  • When you are completed, press CONTROL-O, press ENTER
  • Press CONTROL-X to exit pico.
  • Reboot.
 
Now you have happily installed Mac OSX, XP64, Vista 64, and Windows 7 64 on your Mac.  You'll want to finish each install by going into device manager and ensuring that all drivers have been installed.  On the Vista and Windows 7 partitions, you can use the MAC OSX CD to install the Boot Camp control panel and remaining drivers.  When all is said and done, you'll have four absolutely clean and segregated installations, and one sweet running rig.
  

 

Comments

03/02/2009 07:22 #

Wow that's some seriously advanced configuration!  Thanks for sharing, although my situation is different, I'd greatly appreciate a suggestion from you on how to best proceed.

It's a Macbook Pro, with a single 320 Gb HD, that currently has an 80 Gb Boot Camp part that's running XP Pro.  Ideally I'd like to keep my XP Pro partition, as it and the installed Office 03 are already registered with Microsoft, and working great with VMware Fusion both virtualized and native.

What I want to add is a new, separate Windows 7 partition, that boots natively so I can access Aero.  In a perfect world, I'd simply add a new blank partition, either by shrinking my OSX/HFS+ partition, or shrinking my NTFS/XP partition, then when installing Win7 simply point to that new location, so that the Windows multiboot menu would appear whenever the MBP boots "into Windows" giving me the option to launch either my existing XP, or the new Windows 7 partition, natively.  Again in a perfect world, I could even access the Windows boot menu option when kicking off Fusion from within OSX, although I realize that's probably a pipe dream.

It may even be a pipe dream to even configure a single HD in the MBP to support multiple windows partitions, at all, but based on your apparent expertise, if anyone would know, it would be you.

Thanks in advance for any suggestion, including any that come from other readers of your blog.  

Comparative Noob United States

31/03/2009 07:17 #

Bob,

Thanks so much for the above post.  This is exactly what I am looking to do. Working as a designer, having the best of both Mac and Windows worlds is the way forward.

Just a couple of questions though,  will the windows partitions run using my full availabe amount RAM?  *I am looking to use 3ds max*

...and finaly, do these partitions run from the ROM of the origional hard drive in my mac pro, or do they run of of each of the drives independant memory?

Thanks,

Jamie

Jamie Cook United Kingdom

04/04/2009 02:28 #

Jamie:

Thanks for reading.  Seems like you have some terminoligies mixed up, let me see if I can help.

When you dual boot as described above, you are booting a completely clean copy of the operating system you have selected.  Hence, the Operating system has full control of the resources on the machine.  When using Windows, you must be using a 64-bit version of the operating system in order to see all of the system RAM in instances where you have more than 4GB.  This is due to limitations in 32-bit windows itself and has nothing to do with the fact that you are dual booting.

If your mac pro has less than 4GB of RAM, you can run any version of windows you like and see all of the system RAM without issue.

Also - as for the question of hard drive usage - there is no "ROM" so to speak on the original hard drive.  ROM refers to Read Only Memory and is seperate from your hard drive, RAM, etc.  

When you dual boot, triple boot, or even quad boot, you are booting completely off of the drive you have selected so long as you have dedicated that drive to the particular flavor of operating system you have installed on it.  The only time you "share" a drive between multiple operating systems is if you are using virtualized instances of the operating system (products such as VMWare Fusion and Parallels) or if you are running multiple operating systems within seperate partitions on the same drive.

Even with Parallels and VMWare Fusion, there are ways to completely segregate the Operating Systems on to their own drives.

rjnedved United States

03/05/2009 08:43 #


How about Linux as one of the OS's on a separate drive on the new 2009 Mac Pro.  I like this solution here and have been searching on the internet about doing Linux as one of them and cant seem to find all of the information.  There are a lot of old posts out there and not sure whether there is still an issue with booting straight into Linux with all of the EFI issues. Almost everything I can find is for multi-booting off of one hard drive and a lot is for the MacBook Pro.  It seems like the new Mac Pro hardware allows a much cleaner install all onto separate hard drives.

Eric Warren United States

13/06/2009 11:56 #

Hi Eric:

Unfortunately, I have not experimented with this path but I don't see why it would not work.

rjnedved United States

13/07/2009 11:54 #

Bob, I think you are the only person who can answer my questions.  I have several posts on several forums that no one has answered.  I have a Dual Quad core Mac pro with 3 drives.  The original factory 250 gig with OSX, and 2 WD Caviar Black 1 TB drives.  One is an existing drive for my work files and the other is for Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit.

I actually tried the install for Windows 7 RC (which I successfully burned to DVD) and it went straight to a black screen with:

1.
2.
Select DVD-ROM type:_

The keyboard won't work, so I restart & eject it.  I then tried Vista Ultimate using Boot camp.  It got to the "Select a partition" screen.  Reformatted it and hit OK to select it.  I then got:

Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets it's criteria for installation.

I have read that 2 identically sized drives can cause this.  What do you recommend for either install?  I think I'd rather run Win 7.

Chris United States

13/07/2009 03:33 #

Hello.  I have a dual quad core Mac Pro with 16 gigs of RAM and an ATI Radeon 1900 graphics card.  I have 3 hard drives.  The stock 250 gig drive with OSX on it and 2 Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Black hard drives.  One Caviar drive is my "work drive" and the other is for Windows and Windows software.  I'm having trouble getting Windows installed.

I tried Windows 7 RC (which I successfully burned to DVD).  As soon as I insert the disk, the disk starts up and goes to a black screen with:

1.
2.
Select DVD-ROM type:_

The keyboard stops working and that's it.

I bought Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit.  With that, I get to the screen where you select the BOOT CAMP partition (I split my 1TB in half, giving Windows 500G).  I reformat the partition with the Vista installer, select it and hit go.  Then I get this error:

Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets it's criteria for installation.

I've found a Microsoft paper that says you might have to remove the other hard drives (as you did) to get it to go.  I'd really like to run Windows 7 if you have advice on either install, I'd appreciate it!

Chris Heuer United States

16/07/2009 04:47 #

Thanks for posting this.  I have a similar configuration; is there any way to edit the volume labels that appear on the boot manager screen?  I have MacOSX, Linux, and WinXP, but both the Linux and WinXP appear as "windows" so sometimes I don't select the one I wanted.

Derek United States

10/08/2009 09:06 #

Chris:

I installed windows 7 in exactly the same manner that I had installed all of the other OSes - nothing special.  I pulled out all of the drives, put the W7 CD in the drive, and booted off of it.

As for the problem with "Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation" - I just ran into that problem this past weekend on a completely different machine.  The steps you mention are correct - you must make sure that any other drives are disconnected, but also note that this includes anything that could be considered a "drive" - USB Thumb Drives, External USB or Firewire drives, etc.  Unplug anything that can be thought to be a "drive" and you should get past this issue.

If not, let me know, I'll see what I can find out.

rjnedved United States

13/01/2010 01:32 #

Thank you so much for this info. I have had major trouble with bootcamp but now I have found a work around. Could you please tell me what I should do regarding making windows see/not see osx. I have three drives, first two are osx and the new third is now windows. I have installed windows 7 and now I am trying to Change the Drive Letters and Paths but I have hit a wall. I am told "You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it".
use the following partition tyle for the selected disks (both osx)
MBR
GPT

I am cautious to agree to this as it looks like it will format my osx drives.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Simon New Zealand

13/01/2010 01:56 #

Sorry for double post but I have also had trouble with the OSX not seeing the windows drive. I have entered terminal fine and entered the GUID fine. Trouble is when I go to press Control-O it asks me for the file name to write. I follow your instructions and hit enter. "Cancelled" then comes up. If I follow the instructions again and press control-X. It asks me to save modified buffer (answering no will destroy changes)?
Yes No or Cancel.

What do I do?

Thanks in advance. Smile

Simon New Zealand

18/01/2010 02:49 #

Simon:

The instructions that i posted for editing your fstab will actually *hide* the windows drive, thus making your OSX parition unable to see the windows partition you identify and enter in fstab.  If you want OSX to see the windows partition, do nothing with this step.

As for the key sequence to save the file, not sure there.  Are you using snow leopard?  I wrote these instructions back with good ol' leopard, so perhaps something has changed with pico in the latest version.  Let me know and I'll give it a look.

rjnedved United States

18/01/2010 02:52 #

Oh - wait...  I misread your post... I see now that you want *windows* to see OSX.  I have no experience here.  Not sure how well this would work because OSX is not in a format native to windows apps - hence the reason I made sure that windows could not utilize my OSX drives.

The main reason I'm hiding the drives from the "other" OS is to avoid corruption or bastardization of the data on the "foreign" O/S's drive.   I would not recommend trying to natively use the drives between the two.

rjnedved United States