Over the last few weeks I had been wrestling with a Mac Pro, trying to get a workable triple boot solution for my father’s consulting company. The basic idea was to install Windows 7 and Ubuntu on their own hard drives to complement the existing install of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and use rEFIt as the boot loader solution. This turned out to be easier said than done, and due to all my trials and tribulations trying to get this setup to work, and ultimately succeeding in it, I thought it might not be a bad idea to share what ended up happening in case others are in a similar situation.

The idea of installing each operating system on its own drive seemed like a straightforward enough plan.  The initial impetus for this project and the decision to use multiple drives actually came from an attempt to upgrade the machine to Snow Leopard.  After already partitioning and setting up the triple boot via Boot Camp on the original 640GB hard drive (roughly following the advice found here), I found that the partition table had been changed at some point from GUID (my suspicion is I made a misstep in the Ubuntu installation), and Snow Leopard would not install without a complete reformat of the drive.

So from that point we decided, as the plan was to expand the storage capacity of the computer anyway, to get a hard drive for each operating system and head off any partition table unhappiness.  It turns out installing the OS’s to different drives brings a whole new set of totally unforeseen problems, first and foremost that they each see to have very strong preferences for being in the first drive bay (or hd (0,0) as it is quaintly known by some).  Windows 7 in particular would not even install if it is being pointed towards a drive that is in any other position than the first bay, giving the very helpful error of “Windows 7 cannot install on the partition error code: 0×80070057″.  That was just the first of many problem which I won’t completely go into here, but what follows is the actual solution I ended up with.

Hardware Setup: Mac Pro (July 2009) with 1.5TB Seagate drive (Windows) (HD bay 1), 640GB stock Western Digital hard drive (OS X) (HD bay 2), 1.0TB Seagate drive (Ubuntu) (HD bay 3)

(Note: this order of drives/operating systems turned out to be key, as otherwise both Windows and Ubuntu got very confused and would either boot only one OS or just crash on boot)

Software: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard , Windows 7 RC x64 Build 7100, Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope 64-bit, rEFIt boot toolkit

Process:

1. The first step was to do a standard install of Snow Leopard to the 640GB drive.
2. Once that was done, I installed rEFIt to allow for easy selection of OS and also to fix the Master Boot Record (MBR) after installing Ubuntu. Directions here.
3. Once rEFIt is installed and the system is rebooted twice to assure it is working, I put in the Windows 7 disk and went through with a standard install of that as well. Windows 7 uses an EFI bootloader, which for our purposes means much less headache than Windows XP or Vista which use an MBR bootloader and as I understand cause much more conflicts that must be managed.
4. Now when Windows 7 is installed and boots to the desktop fine after selection in rEFIt, I swapped in the Ubuntu LiveCD and rebooted into the LiveCD desktop.  After starting the install and using defaults for most of the install questions, the step you are looking for is when you partition the drive.  I of course selected the 1TB drive in position hd(2,0) and told it to use the whole drive, where it created a main partition (at /)and a small swap partition.  Making sure the main partition was flagged as bootable in the advanced options, I then proceeded onto the next step, the final before completing installation, and went to the advanced options.  It is here you want to make sure the GRUB bootloader gets installed specifically to the hard drive and partition where you are installing Ubuntu, rather than to the 0,0 drive.  So for my install it was /dev/sdc1, chosen from the graphical menu.  Allow it to finish the install, then reboot back to the rEFIt menu.
5. At the rEFIt menu, arrow over and down to the second icon from the left on the lower row.  This will check to see if the partition table is out of sync (which it is), and repair it when you type “Y” for yes.
6. At this point I found that I could get to a GRUB boot screen by selecting Windows or Linux from the rEFIt menu, but only Windows would boot.  I fixed this by following the GRUB instructions that show at the bottom of the screen and hitting “e” to edit the entry for Ubuntu in the GRUB bootloader, and changed the entry until I found the one that correctly booted Linux, for me it ended up being hd(0,0).  My understanding is that this is where the MBR is, and this is why it needs to look there, but in the end all I know is that it works cleanly and boots into Ubuntu perfectly.
7. That’s it! Sounds so simple when I break it down into these steps, but this was the result of two weeks of troubleshooting and countless reinstalls.  I did end up with a phantom extra Linux icon in rEFIt somehow (the “?” in the image above), but hey, everything is working so I’m not complaining.

Resources:

In the end I aggregated quite a few bookmarks of helpful sites, none applying exactly to my situation, but all providing some helpful tips for when things go wrong with the process.  Here are a few of the best that I came across, hopefully they help you if you came here and are having trouble:

http://refit.sourceforge.net/tripleboot/ – Helpful to a point, but outdated when you are trying to work with Windows 7 and I could not get the LILO bootloader it recommends to work the way they describe.

http://www.rickycampbell.com/booting-windows-linux-and-osx-on-your-mac-without-using-grublilo-to-boot-windows/

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=842100 – A good guide if you are just triple booting off a single hard drive.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=48005 – Good to know how to edit system protected files in Linux like the GRUB bootloader menu.lst if you are new to Linux, like me.

http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp – Extremely detailed walkthrough similar to the first link in this list, but again, a bit outdated if you are doing this on multiple hard drives or with Windows 7.

Super Grub Disk Rescue CDROM – This disk saved me several times when after installing Linux the bootloader was nowhere to be found, and I could not access the Ubuntu install at all.  Booting to this disk (specifically the one titled “grub-rescue-cdrom.iso” on that downloads page), allowed booting to any operating system regardless of bootloader situation.  Very helpful if you are in a tight situation.

And that’s it.  If I think of any other sites that were helpful, or tips on this, I will be sure to come back and update the post.  Hope this has been helpful to at least someone, and happy triple booting.

Announced yesterday, New York City is holding a competition for the next two months to see who can create the most interesting data visualizations with the data provided at the newly launched NYC Data Mine.  The Data Mine site provides 170 data sets from various New York City government agencies and organizations, marking a growing trend in government transparency with regards to data.

The real kicker though is the prizes for the competition.  Head to the contest page for a full breakdown, but they are making available 12 cash prizes totaling $20,000.  Not a bad deal in exchange for some data visualization work, I’d say.  Here’s to hoping more cities would get this info out there, so that we could start to see some really interesting representations of how our cities function (or fail to, as the case may be).

My personal favorites of the available NYC data sets, and the ones that may potentially make it into my entry if they play their cards right, are the “Directory of Barbecuing Areas” set and the “NYC Population Age/Sex Projection by Borough 2000 – 2030″ set.  Can’t wait to see what people start putting together out of this.

More photos to be posted tomorrow.

A house, destroyed by the forces of parking lot advancement, lies half demolished on Riddle Road in Cincinnati.

The house lies just feet from an occupied dwelling on Riddle Road in Cincinnati.

The roof of a collapsed house halfway through demolition, Riddle Road, Cincinnati.

An opening in a collapsed house as it lies halfway through demolition, Riddle Road, Cincinnati.

Rubble and standing water from a demolished apartment building on Riddle Road in Cincinnati.