Triple-Boot Mac (and MBR hell)

It only took about 8 hours of total time, but my MacBook Pro can now triple-boot into OS X 10.4.7, Windows XP Home SP2, and Ubuntu Linux (6.06 I think).

The install is actually not that bad once you've been through it once...the process is basically:

• Use diskutil to dynamically build two new partitions. The Mac comes with one "EFI" partition for boot control and one HFS+ partition. MBR gives you four max, so you build a Linux one followed by a FAT 32 one.
• Install Windows XP. Tedious and annoying but not complicated. Windows takes longer to boot from CD than an entire OS X install from scratch.
• Install Linux. This is the slightly dangerous part, as I found out.

So two things took a long time:

First, for some reason my brand new, genuine Windows XP CD-ROM doesn't work very well. Setup had at least two hangs, a failure to init a disk, a BSOD, and an assertion failure. Maybe all of those holograms on the disk play havoc with the optical drive? So the biggest single item was a 5 hour Windows install that mostly involved trying to boot setup over and over.

Windows XP asks questions during the install, so you have to sit there and watch it. Furthermore, if you are using rEFIt like I am, then you'll have to manually select Windows each time the installer reboots itself. The installer normally expects to reincarnate itself, so if your machine mysteriously reboots without warning be sure to keep reselecting to boot from the Windows install CD-ROM.

The other problem was that, almost certainly due to my own sleepiness this morning, I managed to splat LILO onto the boot block of the Windows partitiont. Ooops. Most tutorials online state that the only fix for this is a complete reinstall of both Windows and Linux, but fortunately I discovered this is not true.

It turns out that you can very gently run fixmbr on your Windows partition without disturbing triple-boot goodness. It's pretty much that simple...just launch the windows setup CD, wait 30 minutes for it to load every driver ever written, launch the recovery tool and use fixmbr on the appropriate drive. Linux and Mac continue to boot via rEFIt.

Now the only issue is: Windows can't understand Mac or Linux partitions, Linux can't understand Mac partitions, and while the Mac will figure anything out, it's not automounting.

Remote Debugging with WinDBG

This is not really a tutorial but rather a quick summary of how to do this so I can find this information quickly in the future:

On the "debugging server" (the PC with the problem)

1. Start WinDBG
2. Type .server npipe:pipe=pipename

On the "debugging client" (the one you're sitting at)

1. Start WinDBG
2. Go to File>Connect to Remote Session
3. For Connection String enter npipe:server=Server, pipe=PipeName [,password=Password] where Server is the hostname/IP and PipeName is the name that the server chose. The password section is optional.