User:Felix/MBP

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On this Page I'd like to document my Triple Boot Installation on my Macbook Pro 15" 1.83 GHz 1.5 GB RAM.

Contents

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Hardware

It is a standard Week 14 built 1.83 GHz MBP with

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Operating Systems

I've installed

  • Mac OS 10.4
  • Gentoo Linux
  • Windows XP Pro SP2 (de)
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Installation

I've installed Windows and Mac OS in a way documented in Triple_Booting. My partition layout is thus a legacy layout combined with the GPT layout and I am limited to 4 partitions:

  1. 200MB hidden fat
  2. 26GB osx hfs+
  3. 41GB linux encrypted jfs
  4. 7GB windows fat32

I've encrypted the complete root partition following roughly a howto. I am using a 32MB swapfile in the root filesystem. Then I installed Gentoo with the useful Gentoo Quick Install Reference. I built my kernel, decryption-initrd and system and ran into the problem that I have to load the kernel and the initrd during boot. The main obstacles were that I

  1. was unable to deposit the kernel+initrd in the encrypted root fs
  2. wanted to Triple Boot, thus I was limited to use 4 partitions
  3. wanted to use legacy BIOS booting through bootcamp because ATI drivers only seem to work combined with this method (although rEFIt might support it soon)
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Booting

I boot normal to osx by using EFI. Or I boot Windows, which is really a syslinux on sda4. I tinkered with lilo and grub but without success (lilo can't load stuff from fat32 partitions and grub yielded stage2 problems). In syslinux I either load the kernel+initrd from the windows fat32 partition or I chainload the ntldr beast.

Installation was straighforward, mount the fat32 windows partition and 

dd if=/dev/sda4 count=1 of=/mnt/sda4/ntldr.bs # backup the ntldr for chainloading
syslinux /dev/sda4                            # this installs syslinux in the first
                                              # 512 bytes of sda4
cp kernel initrd /mnt/sda4                    # get kernel and initrd to the windows
                                              # partition

Create a /mnt/sda4/syslinux.cfg: 

SAY CUSTOMIZE OR USE 'DISPLAY' FILE
DEFAULT g
TIMEOUT 3000
PROMPT 1
LABEL g
KERNEL kernel1
APPEND gpt acpi=force libata.atapi_enabled=1 initrd=initrd1.gz root=/dev/ram0 rw init=/linuxrc
LABEL w 
KERNEL ntldr.bs
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