What will happen if i install OS X on a separate HD?

[Nvidiaguy07]

i asked this question before but put it in the wrong category so here goes:

Right now im dual booting Vista and Ubuntu on my first Hard drive with no problems. I want to give Leopard a try and i have an extra hard drive that im not using to try it on. I want to just go ahead and install it on that 2nd drive but im not completely sure what will happen. Im guessing that itll just keep booting from the Vista HD even after Leopard is installed. If all i have to do is press F12 and select the 2nd hard drive to boot into Leopard ill be ok with that.

Is this what will happen though?

If not what should i do if i want to do this?

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Are you talking aboout a hackintosh?

 

[Nvidiaguy07]

yes, sorry

 

[TheStu]

Tyranicus does something similar in his hackintosh. All he does is just switch the boot priority in the BIOS whenever he wants to switch OSes. That Mobo is supposed to be pretty good with Hackintosh (even though I never could get mine to work correctly).

 

[ViRGE]

I posted this in the OS forum first since I saw this dupe thread there first, but whatever.

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Installing Mac OS X may overwrite the MBR on your boot drive. If that's the case, you're going to have two issues:

1) You won't be able to boot Mac OS X by trying to boot off of the 2nd drive (the Mac OS X installer will not have written to the MBR on that drive)
2) You won't be able to boot Windows/Ubuntu by trying to boot off of the 1st drive (the Mac OS X installer will have written to the MBR on the 1st drive, causing you to immediately boot in to Mac OS X)

Since you are running Ubuntu, my assumption is that you are already using the Ubuntu bootloader (GRUB). This makes things rather easy to correct. Once you install Mac OS X, regardless of the outcome (whether the MBR is written to the first or second drive), you can manually add an entry for it in to GRUB. This way you can boot whatever OS you'd like without needing to select a different boot drive. Right now GRUB is by far the easiest way to triple-boot.

 

[KeypoX]

Originally posted by: Nvidiaguy07
i asked this question before but put it in the wrong category so here goes:

Right now im dual booting Vista and Ubuntu on my first Hard drive with no problems. I want to give Leopard a try and i have an extra hard drive that im not using to try it on. I want to just go ahead and install it on that 2nd drive but im not completely sure what will happen. Im guessing that itll just keep booting from the Vista HD even after Leopard is installed. If all i have to do is press F12 and select the 2nd hard drive to boot into Leopard ill be ok with that.

Is this what will happen though?

If not what should i do if i want to do this?

Yes i think that will work. Just make sure that you have your vista drive unplugged when you install leopard.

Also you could leave in the vista drive, install leopard (it will overwrite your vista boot), then insert vista dvd and repair the vista install. This will take away leopard, but then inside vista you can use the chain0 method to add leopard to the vista bootloader. Or try easyBCD (works sometimes for me).

You can also use leopards boot loader but i like vistas better. I think its pretty easy to do.

This guide here has alot of good info, though i never followed it to the letter. http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=39253

 

[Zaap]

Ditto what others have said- unplug the Vista drive and install OSX as if its the only drive in the system. Keeps things simple, and doesn't mess with your Vista install. The F12 boot select method works great. For ease, use a different model hard drive for the OSX install. Otherwise, with the same drive, they read as the same in the F12 menu and at first you have to guess which is which. Not a big deal though.

Or as ViRGE suggested, add OSX to GRUB. (Last I did that, I needed to copy boot_v8 to a linux-formatted partition of the OSX drive in order for GRUB to launch. Maybe there's a way around all that by now, I dunno. Otherwise, just create a tiny partition of just a few megs to hold boot_v8)

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Zaap
Or as ViRGE suggested, add OSX to GRUB. (Last I did that, I needed to copy boot_v8 to a linux-formatted partition of the OSX drive in order for GRUB to launch. Maybe there's a way around all that by now, I dunno. Otherwise, just create a tiny partition of just a few megs to hold boot_v8)

GRUB is really only useful if you already have (or are willing to install) Linux. Otherwise chainloading through something like EasyBCD is the easier option. I'm not sure why you would need to copy anything though, I had no such issues.

 

[Zaap]

Originally posted by: ViRGE
I'm not sure why you would need to copy anything though, I had no such issues.

Last time I messed with GRUB, I found that it wouldn't see/boot OSX if the OSX install was on a different hard drive as GRUB was installed on, unless there were a Linux formatted partition that GRUB could see on the second HD, and a copy of Boot_v8 on that partition.

Like I said, I'm sure things may have progressed since last I dealt with GRUB and OSX. Possibly now Chameleon/Boot-132 may have eliminated any need for boot_v8?