MacSolidWorks
18th May 2007, 12:02 AM
To my knowledge, nobody has attempted to install all 64bit OS's on a triple boot Mac Pro. I am glad to announce that I've managed to figure it out with a lot of help from other really smart people.
Original posts, blogs, websites, etc, referenced:
Disk partitioning: http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp
Linux (ubuntu) installation: http://macapper.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134
Installing the Operating Systems
OSX
Install Mac OS X: Install Mac OS X as normal onto your hard disk drive with a single partition. (If it's already installed, you can skip this step.) In order to save time, only install the base system at this point. Boot into Mac OS X.
Mac OS X update: Install the Mac OS X combo update and all other updates (if necessary)
firmware update: Install the firmware update for your mac (if necessary).
rEFIt: Install rEFIt at this point
Boot Camp & partitioning
DO NOT download, install, or run the BootCamp Assistant! Since we are installing Windows XPx64 the driver package it creates is useless (32 bit drivers won't work on a 64bit OS).
If you've already partitioned using BootCamp, it created a 3rd partition at end of the drive, you can remove it if you boot from another drive and run this command:
sudo gpt remove -i 3 /dev/disk0
A simpler way to remove the partition is to use Boot Camp Assistant, which allows to "restore the startup disk to a single volume" (see its manual).
Open up a terminal window and type diskutil list. It should look something like this:
/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *115.8 GB disk0
1: EFI 200.0 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 115.5 GB disk0s2
We’re going to re-partition the hard drive now. Right now, there’s only one partition: Apple_HFS (Mac OS X), which takes all of the space on the hard drive. We need to shrink this partition and add 2 others for Windows and Linux. The command syntax is...
sudo diskutil resizeVolume [disk identifier] [disk size] [partition type] ["Partition label"] [partition size] [partition type] ["Partition label"] [partition size]
To do so, type in:
diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 85.5G "Linux" "Linux" 15G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Windows" 15G
You can change the volume names/sizes but not the order. In English, this command resizes the current partition to 85.5 GB (disk0s2 85.5G), creates a 15 GB Linux-type partition labelled “Linux” (”Linux” “Linux” 15G), and creates another 15 GB FAT32-type partition labelled “Windows”(”MS-DOS FAT32″ “Windows” 15G). My 120GB hard drive has 115.8GB, so be sure to change the partition size to match your disk space. After resizing the partitions, it will ask you to reboot. Go ahead and reboot. Verify the partitions to make sure they’re correct. It should look a little something like this:
/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *115.8 GB disk0
1: EFI 200.0 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 85.5 GB disk0s2
3: Linux 15.0 GB disk0s3
4: NTFS/FAT32 15.0 GB disk0s4
If you get error messages see: http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp
Once you have completed the resizing, it will ask you to reboot. Reboot Mac OS X as you would normally do. When it starts up, run diskutil list again and verify that your new partitions have been created!
Windows XPx64
Insert your Windows XPx64 CD and restart. Go ahead and let rEFIt load up and then choose the Windows CD. Or...when you hear the chime, hold down the C key (to boot from CD).
Windows Setup will start. (Upon initial setup from the Windows CD, the install froze at “checking system hardware”, I was able to get it going again by just touching the power button once, do not press and hold as this will turn off the system)
At the disk partition screen, select the C: drive. "Quick partition" it as NTFS (or FAT32 if you want to write to it in Linux and Mac OS X). Setup will continue and eventually it will restart your computer. (see Talk:Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp for a workaround if the Windows installer does not offer to reformat your windows partition at install time - the Windows installer should format it here or it may not be bootable)
After the first restart, choose the Windows HDD from rEFIt in order to continue setting up XPx64. You will need to repeat this until Windows is fully installed.
Install necessary 64bit drivers specific to the MacPro:
Nvidia drivers for 7300GT graphics card: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp64_93.71.html
Chipset drivers for Intel processor: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=N&ProductID=816&DwnldID=13326&strOSs=109&OSFullName=Windows*%20XP%20Professional%20x64%20Ed ition&lang=eng
Network card driver: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/detail_desc.aspx?agr=y&dwnldid=8719
Once your internet connection is up, go to Windows update and install the HD audio bus driver before installing the following driver from RealTek: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=24&PFid=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false#High%20Definition%20Audio%20Codecs
Activate windows: Now that your network card works, activate Windows (so that it doesn't stop working)
You should now have most of your issues in the hardware manager resolved, video up to snuff, and workable audio.
You now have a dual boot system! But obviously, we aren't finished yet.
Linux
NOTE: This installation procedure does NOT require you to install LILO or know any programming at all, everything stated here is in the GUI (windowed environment), and yes it still works with GRUB, and no it does not screw anything up on the EFI or BIOS.
Reboot into Macintosh
Download the latest release 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download, be sure to select the 64bit version before downloading. Burn it to a DVD following the instructions on their website, or just slap the disk image on a DVD, but be sure it's in ISO format. (don't complain to me that you don't have a DVD writer, these instructions are for the MacPro which has a DVD writer from the factory)
Reboot and choose the ubuntu DVD from the rEFIt menu. NOTE: before you select “start or install ubuntu” from the DOS looking screen hit F4 and set the screen resolution to something other than VGA, otherwise you can't see anything but a garbled display.
Once ubuntu is loaded form the LiveCD click the install icon and follow along the setup for the general stuff.
When you come to the partitioning part, make sure you install Linux to the 3rd partition (disk0s3). Ubuntu will ask you to mount a Swap drive to a different partition, but that’s not necessary. Just install “/” to disk0s3.
Pretty soon, the installer will say it “GRUB will be installed to (hd0)”, with (hd0) being a clickable button. Click on the button and delete the (hd0), then click OK. You’ll notice the (hd0) has been replaced with “/dev/”. Go ahead and click the button again, and add “sda3″ at the end. It should say “GRUB will be installed to /dev/sda3″ with “/dev/sda3″ being a clickable button. This will install grub (GRand Unified Bootloader) onto just the Linux partition instead of the entire hard drive.
When finished, it will ask you to reboot. Go ahead and attempt to reboot. (Be warned, the 64 bit version of ubuntu apparently has a shut-down bug from the live CD. When it gets to the part where it ejects the DVD and asks you “remove the CD from the tray and hit enter”...it freezes. You cannot hit enter or any other key to complete the shut down process.
Leave the DVD in the tray, close it, and just hold the power button down until the computer shuts off.
Power up the computer. Let rEFIt load the selection screen as normal. If you try to boot to the installed Linux partition from rEFIt, nothing will happen, you'll just see a pleasant little Linux penguin icon but nothing will boot.
Therefore, boot from the liveCD again (ensuring to hit F4 and set the screen resolution to something other than VGA before it loads.)
Now that you are back in ubuntu on the LiveCD, on the top of the screen find the three menu choices labeled “Applications”, “Places”, and “System”. Click on System>Administration>GNOME Partition Editor
Once the GNOME Partition Editor has launched you will see a list of all the drives on your system, notice that the 200MB EFI protected system partition has a little check mark in the boot column, but the Linux drive labeled /dev/sda3 does not have a little boot check mark.
Click the little button in the boot column to make the /dev/sda3 a bootable volume. Quit the application and reboot.
Upon rEFIt launch, choose the Linux drive (not the LiveCD) and boot to ubuntu.
Setup your internet connection and install the updates to ubuntu.
Install ENVY STABLE RELEASE (0.9.3-0ubuntu5, released on May 16 2007) http://www.albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html
NVIDIA driver setup instructions: http://www.albertomilone.com/latest_nvidia_udsf_feisty.html Follow the installation guide to the letter! If you don't you'll have nothing to see!
If you are using a CinemaHD display and have a 7300GT Nvidia card you will be able to get 1900x1200 resolution by using the nvidia program located under Applications>System Tools>Nvidia settings
You now have an all 64bit Triple Boot system on your Mac Pro!
VERIFICATION
You will now want to reboot into all three OS's to verify that nothing has been destroyed and everything boots well. Notice that we did very little with the terminal window or programmed anything to set this up (except for the Nvidia driver). Pretty cool I think!
Believe me, if I can do this, you can. A big thank you to B0rg and OnMac.net the two sources I stole most of this information from.
Original posts, blogs, websites, etc, referenced:
Disk partitioning: http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp
Linux (ubuntu) installation: http://macapper.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134
Installing the Operating Systems
OSX
Install Mac OS X: Install Mac OS X as normal onto your hard disk drive with a single partition. (If it's already installed, you can skip this step.) In order to save time, only install the base system at this point. Boot into Mac OS X.
Mac OS X update: Install the Mac OS X combo update and all other updates (if necessary)
firmware update: Install the firmware update for your mac (if necessary).
rEFIt: Install rEFIt at this point
Boot Camp & partitioning
DO NOT download, install, or run the BootCamp Assistant! Since we are installing Windows XPx64 the driver package it creates is useless (32 bit drivers won't work on a 64bit OS).
If you've already partitioned using BootCamp, it created a 3rd partition at end of the drive, you can remove it if you boot from another drive and run this command:
sudo gpt remove -i 3 /dev/disk0
A simpler way to remove the partition is to use Boot Camp Assistant, which allows to "restore the startup disk to a single volume" (see its manual).
Open up a terminal window and type diskutil list. It should look something like this:
/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *115.8 GB disk0
1: EFI 200.0 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 115.5 GB disk0s2
We’re going to re-partition the hard drive now. Right now, there’s only one partition: Apple_HFS (Mac OS X), which takes all of the space on the hard drive. We need to shrink this partition and add 2 others for Windows and Linux. The command syntax is...
sudo diskutil resizeVolume [disk identifier] [disk size] [partition type] ["Partition label"] [partition size] [partition type] ["Partition label"] [partition size]
To do so, type in:
diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 85.5G "Linux" "Linux" 15G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Windows" 15G
You can change the volume names/sizes but not the order. In English, this command resizes the current partition to 85.5 GB (disk0s2 85.5G), creates a 15 GB Linux-type partition labelled “Linux” (”Linux” “Linux” 15G), and creates another 15 GB FAT32-type partition labelled “Windows”(”MS-DOS FAT32″ “Windows” 15G). My 120GB hard drive has 115.8GB, so be sure to change the partition size to match your disk space. After resizing the partitions, it will ask you to reboot. Go ahead and reboot. Verify the partitions to make sure they’re correct. It should look a little something like this:
/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *115.8 GB disk0
1: EFI 200.0 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 85.5 GB disk0s2
3: Linux 15.0 GB disk0s3
4: NTFS/FAT32 15.0 GB disk0s4
If you get error messages see: http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp
Once you have completed the resizing, it will ask you to reboot. Reboot Mac OS X as you would normally do. When it starts up, run diskutil list again and verify that your new partitions have been created!
Windows XPx64
Insert your Windows XPx64 CD and restart. Go ahead and let rEFIt load up and then choose the Windows CD. Or...when you hear the chime, hold down the C key (to boot from CD).
Windows Setup will start. (Upon initial setup from the Windows CD, the install froze at “checking system hardware”, I was able to get it going again by just touching the power button once, do not press and hold as this will turn off the system)
At the disk partition screen, select the C: drive. "Quick partition" it as NTFS (or FAT32 if you want to write to it in Linux and Mac OS X). Setup will continue and eventually it will restart your computer. (see Talk:Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp for a workaround if the Windows installer does not offer to reformat your windows partition at install time - the Windows installer should format it here or it may not be bootable)
After the first restart, choose the Windows HDD from rEFIt in order to continue setting up XPx64. You will need to repeat this until Windows is fully installed.
Install necessary 64bit drivers specific to the MacPro:
Nvidia drivers for 7300GT graphics card: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp64_93.71.html
Chipset drivers for Intel processor: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=N&ProductID=816&DwnldID=13326&strOSs=109&OSFullName=Windows*%20XP%20Professional%20x64%20Ed ition&lang=eng
Network card driver: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/detail_desc.aspx?agr=y&dwnldid=8719
Once your internet connection is up, go to Windows update and install the HD audio bus driver before installing the following driver from RealTek: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=24&PFid=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false#High%20Definition%20Audio%20Codecs
Activate windows: Now that your network card works, activate Windows (so that it doesn't stop working)
You should now have most of your issues in the hardware manager resolved, video up to snuff, and workable audio.
You now have a dual boot system! But obviously, we aren't finished yet.
Linux
NOTE: This installation procedure does NOT require you to install LILO or know any programming at all, everything stated here is in the GUI (windowed environment), and yes it still works with GRUB, and no it does not screw anything up on the EFI or BIOS.
Reboot into Macintosh
Download the latest release 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download, be sure to select the 64bit version before downloading. Burn it to a DVD following the instructions on their website, or just slap the disk image on a DVD, but be sure it's in ISO format. (don't complain to me that you don't have a DVD writer, these instructions are for the MacPro which has a DVD writer from the factory)
Reboot and choose the ubuntu DVD from the rEFIt menu. NOTE: before you select “start or install ubuntu” from the DOS looking screen hit F4 and set the screen resolution to something other than VGA, otherwise you can't see anything but a garbled display.
Once ubuntu is loaded form the LiveCD click the install icon and follow along the setup for the general stuff.
When you come to the partitioning part, make sure you install Linux to the 3rd partition (disk0s3). Ubuntu will ask you to mount a Swap drive to a different partition, but that’s not necessary. Just install “/” to disk0s3.
Pretty soon, the installer will say it “GRUB will be installed to (hd0)”, with (hd0) being a clickable button. Click on the button and delete the (hd0), then click OK. You’ll notice the (hd0) has been replaced with “/dev/”. Go ahead and click the button again, and add “sda3″ at the end. It should say “GRUB will be installed to /dev/sda3″ with “/dev/sda3″ being a clickable button. This will install grub (GRand Unified Bootloader) onto just the Linux partition instead of the entire hard drive.
When finished, it will ask you to reboot. Go ahead and attempt to reboot. (Be warned, the 64 bit version of ubuntu apparently has a shut-down bug from the live CD. When it gets to the part where it ejects the DVD and asks you “remove the CD from the tray and hit enter”...it freezes. You cannot hit enter or any other key to complete the shut down process.
Leave the DVD in the tray, close it, and just hold the power button down until the computer shuts off.
Power up the computer. Let rEFIt load the selection screen as normal. If you try to boot to the installed Linux partition from rEFIt, nothing will happen, you'll just see a pleasant little Linux penguin icon but nothing will boot.
Therefore, boot from the liveCD again (ensuring to hit F4 and set the screen resolution to something other than VGA before it loads.)
Now that you are back in ubuntu on the LiveCD, on the top of the screen find the three menu choices labeled “Applications”, “Places”, and “System”. Click on System>Administration>GNOME Partition Editor
Once the GNOME Partition Editor has launched you will see a list of all the drives on your system, notice that the 200MB EFI protected system partition has a little check mark in the boot column, but the Linux drive labeled /dev/sda3 does not have a little boot check mark.
Click the little button in the boot column to make the /dev/sda3 a bootable volume. Quit the application and reboot.
Upon rEFIt launch, choose the Linux drive (not the LiveCD) and boot to ubuntu.
Setup your internet connection and install the updates to ubuntu.
Install ENVY STABLE RELEASE (0.9.3-0ubuntu5, released on May 16 2007) http://www.albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html
NVIDIA driver setup instructions: http://www.albertomilone.com/latest_nvidia_udsf_feisty.html Follow the installation guide to the letter! If you don't you'll have nothing to see!
If you are using a CinemaHD display and have a 7300GT Nvidia card you will be able to get 1900x1200 resolution by using the nvidia program located under Applications>System Tools>Nvidia settings
You now have an all 64bit Triple Boot system on your Mac Pro!
VERIFICATION
You will now want to reboot into all three OS's to verify that nothing has been destroyed and everything boots well. Notice that we did very little with the terminal window or programmed anything to set this up (except for the Nvidia driver). Pretty cool I think!
Believe me, if I can do this, you can. A big thank you to B0rg and OnMac.net the two sources I stole most of this information from.