Triple-Boot Mac Part 2: MBRs Are Still Hell

A while ago I blogged about the setup process to get OS X 10.4, Windows XP, and Ubuntu 6.06 onto my MacBook Pro. I tried the same trick today on a Mac Pro running OS X 10.5, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu 8.04. To further complicate things, I created a true swap partition.

Now in the old way, Windows had to be last on the disk...fortunately Vista is a little bit more savvy about partitioning (although it stil uses MBR and not GPT partitions). So the order of operations was:

1. Install rEFIt onto the Mac.
2. Use diskutil to partition the main drive, cutting off three new Fat-32 partitions, size 30G, 30G, and 10G, which will become Vista, Linux and a swap partition.
3. Install ext2FSX.
4. Reformat the second Fat-32 partition as ext2 format. (Once ext2FSX is installed, Disk Utility will let you do this.)
   
5. Install Ubuntu, using manual partitioning, and using the last Fat32 partition as a swap file.
6. On reboot, Use rEFITs's partition tool to fix the MBR partition table, which the Ubuntu installer will trash.
   
7. Install Vista onto the middle partition, which hasn't been used. Vista will want you to reformat the Fat-32 partition as NTFS, which is fine. One tricky part: since rEFIt is installed, when Vista reboots you have to pick the volume that the Vista installer thinks it is rebooting to. As far as I can tell, this is always the volume Vista is being installed on.
8. Reboot with the Ubuntu Live CD, and run a grub shell and use "setup" to put a boot sector back on the Linux partition. I don't know why it was missing - possibly an error in setting up Ubuntu the first time.

Some notes on the sketchier steps:

• Why ext2 on Mac? For some reason the 10.5 version of diskutil won't format Linux volume drives. The problem is that when the Ubuntu installer reformats the FAT-32 partition as ext2, OS X doesn't know about it. The next time you boot OS X, your Linux partition is mounted as a FAT-32 volume, which completely trashes it. It took me quite a few tries to figure this out, and I got myself into a state where I had to totally rebuild the startup drive from a full format and reinstall OS X itself. So converting the format to ext2 is a hack to keep the partition from getting smashed by OS X.
• rEFIt is great - given a valid GPT partition table and a screwed up MBR table, it'll usually do what you want. It will prioritize the first four partitions, hence the Linux swap is the last partition, not Vista. (BTW Vista's partition tool sees the swap partition as "unused space" - so do not repartition in Vista.)
• The goo to rebuild grub is more or less:

sudo grub
root (hd0,3)
setup (hd0,3)

Grub will complain a bit, but it will fix the MBR. Note that hd0,3 means the 4th partition on the first hard drive, so your mileage may vary. Tab completion in grub is a great way to scan the local files sytems, e.g. type root(hd to list drives and root(hd0, to list partitions.