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Does anyone have experience at using Bootcamp with 2 different Windows versions? I would like to try the Win 7 beta on a spare harddrive in my Mac Pro. I have OS X on drive 1, drive 2 is formated with HFS+. Drive 3 is formatted as HFS+ as well, but it's empty. Drive 4 has WinXP Pro on it. I want to put Win 7 beta on Drive 3.

Will there be any issues with this?

I think this is what you need
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jsp ... ID=1853851

Not specific to your setup, you will have issues booting to Win 7 - the Startup Disk prefpane doesn't show my Win7 install. I have to boot using Option. Interestingly, the Boot Camp control panel in Win7 does manage to find my OS X install and set the boot drive that way...my guess is that Leopard's Boot Camp software hasn't been updated to recognize Win7.

So anyway don't be surprised if you don't get what you expect when you want to go from Leopard to Windows 7.

edit: nevermind, if you're goign to use rEFIt you need to not be using the Startup Disk control panel anyway, I think.

So, other than Bootcamp being somewhat flakey as far as Win 7 support, the dual Windows OS booting should work? Like if I had XP and Vista drives?

Seems that way, but I'm in no position to test it myself.

I might yank the other drives and boot from the CD with just drive 3 in the machine, install Win7, and then shove the drives back in. Then boot with Opt and choose whichever OS you want.

I'm dual booting, but on two physically separate hard drives. No issues so far. I'm not a fan of partitioning HDDs for tasks like this or using Virtual OSes

pete, when'd you get a mac?

I've done what you describe, and I very much do NOT recommend it. Boot Camp's wizard is far and away much easier than doing everything by hand, and less likely to h0rk your OSX install. However, the Boot Camp wizard is intended for the OSX user to run it and put in a Windows CD and have *everything* else done automagically. It's really not meant to do much more than it does by default.

That said, there's no reason you can't mix and match, use BC wizard and then strike out on your own.

Personally, if I was going to triple boot on my iMac these days, I'd simply do a live resize via diskutil and install one of the EFI/GPT-aware Windows versions (x64 only, Vista/7 only). Boot Camp's wizard does a lot of very fiddly manipulation on your behalf, doing GPT/MBR compatibility tricks and the like. Once you stray off the default beaten path, an awful lot can go wrong.

Forge wrote:

I've done what you describe, and I very much do NOT recommend it. Boot Camp's wizard is far and away much easier than doing everything by hand, and less likely to h0rk your OSX install. However, the Boot Camp wizard is intended for the OSX user to run it and put in a Windows CD and have *everything* else done automagically. It's really not meant to do much more than it does by default.

That said, there's no reason you can't mix and match, use BC wizard and then strike out on your own.

Personally, if I was going to triple boot on my iMac these days, I'd simply do a live resize via diskutil and install one of the EFI/GPT-aware Windows versions (x64 only, Vista/7 only). Boot Camp's wizard does a lot of very fiddly manipulation on your behalf, doing GPT/MBR compatibility tricks and the like. Once you stray off the default beaten path, an awful lot can go wrong.

This is what I am looking to do. I have four harddrives, two of which are dedicated to OS X, 1 is free to use as I see fit, and one has WinXP on it. If I can use that third disk for Win 7, that's what I would like to do. The question is really whether or not Bootcamp can handle two seperate Windows partitions/disks and if it can handle Win 7 with a minimum of fiddling.

In your situation I would not use Boot Camp at all. Boot Camp is designed to ease the installation of a secondary Windows install onto a Mac with a single hard disk. If you're dedicating a drive to the Windows install, all the EFI and GPT vs. MBR issues just plain go away. You do not need Boot Camp.

Blank the target disk via Disk Utility (not strictly necessary, but this makes sure you're pointing the Windows installer at the right disks/partitions). I simply tell Disk Utility to format the disk with a single partition, MBR partition table. This lets me format the partition FAT32 and then name it something like 'KILLME', which is visible in the disk selection stages of Windows install.

Install rEFIt to your primary OS disk. rEFIt is teh business for anyone booting >1 OS on a Mac. It's like the default Mac bootloader (option key), except it's more extensible and flexible. It'll boot most anything, too.

After installing rEFIt and verifying that it works as expected, simply put in the Windows 7 DVD. Reboot, and pick the big shiny round thing in rEFIt. The installer begins.

You could set up Vista or Win7 to boot natively into a GPT disk, using EFI directly instead of the BIOS module, but there really is *no* benefit to doing so. None at all.


Anyways, Boot Camp wizard is overkill and not really useful for what you are doing. You should be able to install another OS without using it at all, thanks to your config.

This is what I was looking for. Thanks, Forge!

I'll give it a shot this weekend. Should be a nice little project.

Well, tried it this evening, couldn't get very far.

rEFIt works fine, problem is with the install. I have the 64bit Win 7 version. Tried the EFI 64 version, it errored out. Tried the DVD disk, it boots the disk, but then it asks me to select what kind of DVD drive, with a selection of 1 and 2, but no text beyond that and it won't respond to keyboard commands. Tried the legacy EFI and it it did the same thing.

Not sure what to do, so I am downloading the beta again, just in case there was some sort of defect with my download.

Not a defect in teh ISO, as it's happened to pretty much everyone with the 64-bit version. I had to go with 32-bit.

Okay, found a couple of possible solutions, one complicated, one possibly easy. Naturally, I am trying the easy one first.

http://harfiyanto.wordpress.com/2009/01 ... ogspotcom/

http://jowie.com/blog/post/2008/02/24/S ... -file.aspx

I'll report back with info.

Okay, the first example doesn't work, but the second one does, or at least it's booting. I am still installing.

Use this link.

One thing that is not very clear in the instructions is that this was for Vista 64bit, there is a slight difference in the settings you use for Win 7, instead of using 4 sectors to load, you will want to use 8. It's in the print, but not the screen shot.

Got it all installed and booted up. Works great, except that I need drivers. Any way to extract the bootcamp drivers for use in the Win 7 install?

IME you get the Windows drivers either by slotting in the OSX 10.5 DVD or just going to Apple's site and downloading the big .exe while back in OSX.