Triple-boot Windows, OS X and Ubuntu

[squishysquashy]

Evening, all! I have just purchased a new laptop at pcspecialist.co.uk. It has two hard drives: a 240GB SSD with Windows 8 installed, and a 750GB hybrid drive.

I would love to have Windows in triple boot with Mac OS X and Ubuntu, and plan on partitioning the 750GB hybrid drive into the following three partitions:

100Gb - OS X
100Gb - Ubuntu
550Gb - free space for my music, movies, etc.

I would appreciate any advice you may have regarding how to do this.

 

[squishysquashy]

Triple boot windows, mac and ubuntu

I have a new laptop with two hard drives:

240Gb SSD with Windows 8
750Gb hybrid drive for data.

I'd love to have triple boot set up so that I can boot into Windows, OS X or Ubuntu. I plan on partitioning the hybrid drive like so:

100Gb - OS X
100Gb - Ubuntu
550Gb - free space for music, games etc

Please give me some suggestions as to how to get triple boot set up!

 

[mishra]

Hmm it's a tough one tbh. Normally you would install Windows first, then you would put Ubuntu on second partition and you would use GRUB to manage which system you want to boot with.
Now then you want to throw OSX into the mix... not sure if that's doable as I do not know where does OSX put it's boot information.

Why in the world you want to have triple system boot? If it's just curiosity and you want to play with things. Install Windows as your main OS and then install OSX and Ubuntu as Virtual Machine through virtualbox or VMware virtualization.

Some things can be done, triple boot is doable probably, but it's really asking for troubles in the long run IMHO.

 

[Wolvo7]

Think I heard somewhere that you can't install OSX on a PC (legally). Of course there are loads of ways around that from a quick google search.

 

[mdwh]

Virtual machines don't work well for some things, e.g., 3D graphics, so there is some use for a dedicated partition. However VMs work well for most things, so it is indeed worth asking whether a VM is good enough. (I have a small dedicated Linux partition for when I need 3D graphics, but most of the time it's easier to use a VM.) VMs also have the advantage that you can run it at the same time as your main OS; you can take "snapshots"; it's much easier to have as many VMs as you like (e.g., you want to try different Linux distributions, or test a new version).

One piece of advice is to double check which is the primary and secondary drive (as seen by the operating systems). Unfortunately my laptop was set up with the SSD as the secondary drive - Windows had been installed onto it, but this meant that the boot loader was on the other (primary) drive. This may or may not cause problems depending on what you want to do regarding boot menus, but it's worth making sure you know what the situation is, before you go writing OSs or boot menus to the wrong drive

OS X isn't available to buy on its own, and won't run automatically on non-Apple PCs, though apparently it can be made to do so.