Question about multibooting 3 OSes Lion/Win7/WinXP

[Bonesetter]

Help with multibooting 3 OSes Lion/Win7/WinXP

I'm looking to add a WinXP drive to my current set-up so I can run some older apps that seem to have a lot of problems in Win7 Ultimate where Win7 attaches gibberish characters onto the back of file names making them unusable.

Currently, I'm running a Multiboot machine with Lion on my main drive, Win7 on a second drive, and a third backup drive that is partitioned for CCC and time machine. After reading through the multi boot guide here:
http://www.tonymacx86.com/snow-leop...multibooting-novice-updated-3-12-see-log.html

I've come to the conclusion that setting up a multi boot machine with XP looks to be a little more difficult than I anticipated. i.e..making the XP drive have a small boot partition and installing drivers with a storage drive etc..

Would it be possible to just format the hard drive I purchased for XP as a mac drive and run bootcamp with XP from there? That way I'd be able to keep my current boot loader defaulting to OSX and everything would be the way it is now? (wife uses OSX and not sure I want to try to explain to her how to boot different drives)

Thanks for any advice, it's appreciated!

UPDATE: I've done a little more research and am finding that running bootcamp only works from your partitioned main drive, and it appears it may just make things more difficult.

I've gone ahead and followed the guide above, but ran into a problem when trying to install XP. I partitioned my 250gb HDD into 2 partitions, one about 1gb formatted with MacOS extended and the other 249gb formatted MSDOS FAT. I unplugged my drives, attached the non-chip SATA cable and attempted to install XP. At first I thought maybe it was because not all the SATA ports were set to IDE, but in the 2 places I could find in the BIOS I set them to IDE. Please see the attached pic. Any words of wisdom on what to do here?

 

[Bonesetter]

I did some searching and found that it might be my XP disc that is too old. So, I slipstreamed SP2 in the disc and now I got it to copy all the XP files to my drive and appear to install, but when it goes to reboot it hangs at the black screen "Loading operating system..."and it just sits there.

I never would have imagined it would be this hard jut to install XP!

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

Ive seen your exact issue and never got it to work either.

The one thing i was going to try was this:

When dual/multibooting on a real mac with XP (Not bootcamp, i mean real dual booting), the only way it would work is that the system drive had to contain 4 partitions. XP had to be on the very last partition, and the first 3 had to be formatted and in a format XP didnt understand; it was not enough to leave them unformatted. I think i used ext3.

When you installed XP, it could see the partitions, but ignored them for the purpose of drive lettering, so that 4th partition became the C drive, even though the first 3 were listed but unusable.

XP installed and booted fine from that 4th partition, and only that one. All the partitions had to be Primary as well, none of that extended stuff.

I realise this was all based on a real mac, but maybe the above info might give you a few ideas for getting yours running.

The picture im seeing right now is:

Partition 1 : EFI hidden
Partition 2 : OSX
Partition 3 : Win7
Partition 4 : Win XP

Food for thought

Btw, why didnt you just slipstream XP straight to Service Pack 3 ?

 

[Bonesetter]

Thanks for the response,

Btw, why didnt you just slipstream XP straight to Service Pack 3 ?

Mostly because I'm a noob…Actually, it's because the article I saw about the fix for my above screenshot linked me to how to do the SP2 slipstream. All the links where there and I was so caught up in trying to get it to work that I did't just sit back and think about it. I'm not too familiar with the service packs or what's contained in them, but can a person just skip right to SP3 without 1 or 2?

I'm not sure if I understand correctly, but I think you were trying to get all of the OSes on one drive? I'm trying to install them on their own drives and then boot from say Chameleon to chose which OS on startup.

I may try wiping my drive tonight and reformatting it into 4 partitions just to try it. (Unless I'm not understanding your post) I formatted it with Disc Utility into two partitions, but when I got to the install screen with XP it was showing 3 partitions, 2 smaller(one I created) and the larger one in MSDOS FAT. I'm imagining that's normal?

I thought maybe my problem was just a simple BIOS setting that I'm missing or something, which it still could be, but I'm running out of ideas. Thanks for your help!

UPDATE: After doing some more searching online, I'm thinking my problem lies in the fact that my HDD is SATA and not ATA. I'm seeing a few articles talking about not just slipstreaming service packs, but also SATA drivers onto the XP CD. Does this sound like it could be my problem?

 

[Bonesetter]

I re-created a new bootable XP Pro install disc with SP3 slipstreamed using nLite. I reformatted my HDD with Disc Utility into 2 partitions again. I shut down, unplugged all the HDDs except my blank drive and plugged it into my Marvell GSATA port. I switched both PCH SATA Control Mode to IDE and GSATA3 Ctrl Mode to IDE in BIOS and then proceeded to boot from CD. WinXP verifies my hardware and copies all of it's files over the partition that I choose and then reboots. On reboot, I now get past the "Loading operating system…" and now it says "Missing operating system_".

I tried booting from CD again and using the recovery console and "fixmbr" but the same error happened again when trying to boot from the drive. It's almost as if booting from the HDD is trying to boot from the blank small MacOS partition instead of the XP partition. Is that possible?

Is there someway to make the XP partition the active one or something?

Thanks for any response!

 

[Bonesetter]

I hate to keep replying to my own posts, but what's strange with this is if I change my BIOS back to AHCI and try to boot from the XP drive, it actually starts to boot, but then I get the blue screen like my original post….

So why is it that it finds the OS when booting in AHCI but not in IDE? I'm going crazy…and running out of ideas...