Installing Win 7 on separate hd after Lion

[Bonesetter]

I keep reading that it's easy to install Win 7 on a second hd but I'm a pretty big noob with windows and with building computers so I have a few "probably very easy" questions. It seems most of the guides are for dual booting on the same hd. I just want to make sure I don't mess up my fully functioning new hack with lion.

I've been following the forums for months now and finally took the plunge to build my first hack because like many, I got sick of waiting for Apple to release new machines. I built the first listed CustoMac Pro build to a T other than using a different case. Due to the guides found here, it was relatively painless and everything went smooth other than trying to get my 500gb Seagate Barracuda drive to boot on its own on start-up. But through hours of searching I finally got it working. So thank you tonymac and crew for all of your hard work, it's really appreciated!

Now, I have an identical hd to put windows 7 ultimate on and I'm not quite sure the best process to get it working. Do I connect the hd and use disc utility to format it first? Or do I just unplug my OSX drive, plug in my blank drive, and then boot from disc to format and install? Not sure if it matters, but I used the iBoot method to install lion from a usb drive on my first hd.

Thanks for any help in advance!

 

[Stork]

Could you please provide a little more detail on how you got Lion on your one drive? This will help in giving you advice.

 

[Bonesetter]

I downloaded the Lion installer from the App Store on my macbook and followed the unibeast guide here:
http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2011/10/ ... using.html

I created a bootable usb drive as recommended and then used multibeast to finish my install with UserDSDT for my motherboard. I had trouble getting Lion to boot on it's own at first because OSX wasn't reading my HD as bootable. (found a link to a solution in the forums here, where I did some terminal commands to get it to work) Once everything was working, I plugged in my graphics card and installed a 2nd stick of RAM. Then I started reading about the issues with the i5-2500k being stuck at 1.6 gHz so I downloaded the new multibeast and installed the SSDT for my processor.

So as it stands, I have a bootable Lion USB drive, and a machine running lion without any hiccups yet. I purchased 2 of the Seagate Barracuda SATA 6Gb/s when I bought all my parts and was planning on running Lion on one, Windows 7 on the other. I just am not sure what steps to take to get windows on the other blank drive.

So.. I was looking for a guide to do a new install on the second hard drive and saw a few on here, but the ones I can find involve partitioning and dual booting on one drive. My thought process is to unplug my OSX hd, plug in the blank one, and then install windows from DVD. But I wasn't sure if I needed to format the drive first using disc utility, or if the installer will do that for me. Once it is installed, I wasn't sure if chameleon/chimera would automatically allow me to choose on start-up or what I needed to do to make it work.

I haven't worked too much with windows other than on other people's computers or with bootcamp, so I'm not entirely sure if settings need to be changed or if drivers need to be installed or what once I get it installed. Thanks for your help!

 

[Stork]

Thanks for providing the details. You should have no trouble following Going Bald's Multi Boot Guide: viewtopic.php?f=81&t=20872

Good Luck! Welcome to the club of Multi-Booting. I have several versions of OS X, Windoze 7 and Ubuntu on my systems.

 

[Bonesetter]

Thank you for that link. It does look very straight forward, although it states to install Win7 first and then do the OSX install. I'll just be reversing them I guess. I've never installed Windows onto a blank drive before, so that's why I was wondering if there was an additional step involved. I'll give it a go and see how it turns out.

Thanks again for the responses!

 

[Going Bald]

One thing you might want to consider is whether or not you want to allow Win7 installer to install extra unneeded partitions. The easiest way to prevent it is to format the HDD with a 3rd party tool like gParted before you install Win7. This forces the installer to install everything on the preformatted partition rather than creating its own partitions.

A lot of people are trying to install Win7 on GUID formatted HDD's using UEFI. It is done by hitting the boot device selectoin function key at post. You will find your DVD drive listed twice - once as an IDE device and once as a UEFI device. Selecting the UEFI device allows you to install directly to a GPT+ formatted HDD.
However, if you do this, the Win7 installer will install those extra partitions because they are now required. One of them is an EFI partition where the boot files are located. Unfortunately, the Chimera / Chameleon boot loaders are unable to see them - just like when you install Grub2 to the HDD instead of the root directory for Linux distros. You will need to hit your boot device selector function key to select the Win7 drive to boot.

 

[Bonesetter]

One thing you might want to consider is whether or not you want to allow Win7 installer to install extra unneeded partitions. The easiest way to prevent it is to format the HDD with a 3rd party tool like gParted before you install Win7. This forces the installer to install everything on the preformatted partition rather than creating its own partitions.

What is the downside to these extra partitions? Just less space on the HDD? I mostly need the windows install for a few programs and probably shouldn't have an issue with space. I doubt I'll ever fill 500gigs stuff on the windows drive. All of my media and things will be stored on the mac side.

I guess the other thing I could do is just partition my drive and dual boot. That way I would just have the extra drive for back-up purposes for now and add another drive later for storage of media files and such. I would imagine it would be easier to keep the OSes on separate drives though? Thanks again for the comments!

 

[Going Bald]

One thing you might want to consider is whether or not you want to allow Win7 installer to install extra unneeded partitions. The easiest way to prevent it is to format the HDD with a 3rd party tool like gParted before you install Win7. This forces the installer to install everything on the preformatted partition rather than creating its own partitions.

What is the downside to these extra partitions? Just less space on the HDD? I mostly need the windows install for a few programs and probably shouldn't have an issue with space. I doubt I'll ever fill 500gigs stuff on the windows drive. All of my media and things will be stored on the mac side.

I guess the other thing I could do is just partition my drive and dual boot. That way I would just have the extra drive for back-up purposes for now and add another drive later for storage of media files and such. I would imagine it would be easier to keep the OSes on separate drives though? Thanks again for the comments!

Better yet, get a small 64G SSD and put Win7 on it, saving the HDD for storage.
The downside to the extra partitions is mainly wasted space and aesthetics - depending on your Win7 version, it will make a small System Reserved partition at the start of the drive and put all of the boot files there. You just have to select System Reserved in Chimera boot screen instead of Windows NTFS.

 

[Bonesetter]

I went ahead and got up the courage to dig back in and unplug and plug things back in and the windows install went without a problem. However, when I plugged in my lion drive boot up now with both drives plugged in, chameleon boots my lion drive automatically without giving me a choice.

Do I need to reinstall chameleon through Multibeast or something to get it to see my Windows 7 drive?

Thanks!

 

[jester969]

You can either hit the SPACE bar @ Chimera screen and select the OS from the menu.

OR

Install the Instant Menu kext from Multibeast to select which OS to boot.