OSX86 question

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koffiejunkie

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So I got my ASUS 1201N a few days back, and I spent about a day in total reading various articles and threads on insanelymac and the osx86 wiki. This laptop appers to have some funkyness with it's USB controller (at least as far as OSX goes) and as such I have been unable to make it boot the OSX installer from either as USB stick or USB DVD drive. The one method that's reported to work around the USB issue, meklort's NetbookBootMaker program, crashes halfway through the process, leaving me with a USB stick that doesn't boot anything.

So I decided to try an alternative approach. Install OSX in VirtualBox, superduper it over to a hardrive, and then insert this drive into the ASUS.

Has anyone tried this approach? Any caveats? I would just like to get my installation as ready as I can, because the hard drive replacement on the ASUS is about as cumbersome as on my pre-unibody MBP.
 
That should work. In fact you don't need superduper, what you can do is connect the hard drive with USB, then install snow leopard onto it with the Snow leopard installer (this is with a Mac), then put on chameleon and kexts and whatever hacky things you need.
 
Thanks. As far as I know everything except the NIC, wifi and sound works out of the box with Snow Leopard. Sound I'm not concerned about, since I'm only wanting OSX on it to use Aperture when I'm travelling, and my iPhone goes along. Either ways, there are kexts for it, so it's not an issue. There seems to be a solution for the NIC, although what I've read so far is a bit confusing, and for the odd occasion that I need it I'm happy to get one of Apple's USB NICs. Wifi was a known issue and the card from the Dell Vostro 1501 is known to work - OSX sees it as an Airport card.

Right now I'm fighting the Windows recovery partition first. It didn't ship with a restore DVD, and it includes no utility to create a restore DVD from the restore partition. Looking at it, I realised the partition is just the content of a restore disc, with the twist that it has two 3GB odd archives on, so that won't work on a DVD. I looked up how to make a install disc on a USB flash drive, and that seems straight forward, I just need to partition it correctly with diskpart and run bootsect.exe - which of course is missing :( Rapidshare and all these have copies of it, all of them reported to be infected.
 
Seems like I found the way around the Windows restore problem. I noticed, while in linux, fdisk shows the restore partition as FAT32 hidden (fdisk type 1b), while the instructions I found for making an install USB stick specifies using NTFS. I did the whole thing again, this time formatting as FAT32, made it bootable, copied the contents of the partition over, and what do you know, it booted straight away. Now, the part that I don't know is weather the USB bootloader loaded up the original partition or the stuff on the USB stick - no way to tell since the restore interface is completely active. I'll have to wait until I have the bigger disc to put into it, before trying it.
 
Seems the Windows Restore is hard-wired to only work when you restore to partition number 1. Or some other variable that I destroyed. Fortunately I found a MS Technet install DVD that accepts my key.

Now the next challenge: Getting Windows 7 to install on a GPT partition. From all the howtos I've read, this should just work, but the installer doesn't like it. Does anyone know of particular tricks that I need to get this to work?
 
Yes there is a way but from what I remember you have to set up partitioning a certain way before you install any form of OS. I got link somewhere on my laptop but to lazy to start it up now. Just google OS X Win7 dual boot.
 
Ponder, thanks for replying, but seriously, you should know me better by now. I've spent the whole day following various howtos and suggestions from forums and done about 15 OSX installs. No howto I've found mentions that Windows gives any issues about installing on a GPT partition. But then looking at the windows forums, everyone says Windows 7 can't install on a GPT partition. So clearly something's missing.

I have a suspicion I know what - the presence of EFI. Still trying to figure out how to get this set up in a sensible way since I'll need it for OSX too - not sure if they can share one partition.
 
Thanks Ponder. That post demonstrates my problem though. It says "Disk utility creates a hybrid MBR/GPT disk this way" which I doubt is true, since Windows keep complaining about the disk being GPT, even though I created only three partitions - EFI, OSX and Windows. Or maybe it simply isn't true for the 10.6.0 install DVD?

As it happens, I was suspecting the MBR/GPT hybrid isn't happening. So I tried again, and then booted off my Ubuntu install USB, downloaded the gptsync .deb package from the Debian repositories (since it's not in Ubuntu's repos, oddly enough), ran that, and as I suspected, the MBR wasn't synced at all. After doing this, Windows picked up the partition and installed without any complaints.

Now I'm just trying to work out how to get everything into one bootloader...
 
koffiejunkie said:
Thanks Ponder. That post demonstrates my problem though. It says "Disk utility creates a hybrid MBR/GPT disk this way" which I doubt is true, since Windows keep complaining about the disk being GPT, even though I created only three partitions - EFI, OSX and Windows. Or maybe it simply isn't true for the 10.6.0 install DVD?

As it happens, I was suspecting the MBR/GPT hybrid isn't happening. So I tried again, and then booted off my Ubuntu install USB, downloaded the gptsync .deb package from the Debian repositories (since it's not in Ubuntu's repos, oddly enough), ran that, and as I suspected, the MBR wasn't synced at all. After doing this, Windows picked up the partition and installed without any complaints.

Now I'm just trying to work out how to get everything into one bootloader...
Click to expand...

Don't worry, we will sort it out. I just booted up my laptop to find the links I bookmarked and here they are:
1.) http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dua...native-triple-boot-guide-using-chameleon.html
2.) http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dua...e-boot-osx-win7-ubuntu-through-chameleon.html

When I partitioned my drive I used method #1 and installed OS X 10.6.3 (from retail DVD via iBoot cd follow by MultiBeast post install) with the intention of installing Windows 7 & Arch Linux later on which I have not got around to yet.
Anyway, I rebooted my machine about 5min ago, inserted the Win7 DVD to start the installation. I tried pointing it to the reserved FAT32 partition just for schits and giggles and it biacthed about not being able to install to the GUID partition which is fine seeing the guide above tells you to format the partition first, after formatting the partition as per the instructions the Win7 Installer happily carried on with what ever makes it tick. I aborted the install (not in the mood at 2am) and I know it works so lekker.

In the process of testing I borked my MBR and Chameleon would not load but I expected that and got it fixed quickly by booting with my iBoot boot loader cd and starting my OS X install followed by running MultiBeast again to install Chameleon and bobs your uncle ;)

So my advice to you is to follow link #1 in this post to the letter (except you only need two partitions) and you will be fine, I'll do the same tomorrow and install Win 7 ;)
 
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Thanks Ponder. The two links you post are amongst the ones I tried yesterday that didn't work for me. As I mentioned yesterday, after running gptsync, all was well. It took a bit more fiddling to get the the three different bootloaders playing nicely - basically having grub installed to my linux partition instead of to the MBR, and then installing Chameleon. Now I can boot each OS :)

This laptop has been a bit tricky to get everything going on, and booting OSX isn't all that reliable - occasionally it kernel panics. I've figured out that it's usually after running either Windows or Linux and soft rebooting - either of them seems to leave the hardware in a state that OSX doesn't like. The solution is to shut down, disconnect the battery and mains, reconnect and switch it on. Not too much hassle, given how I intend to use it.
 
Well done! That's awesome. Windows 7, Snow Leopard and Linux all together :)

It kernel panics on my sister's laptop occasionally too during boot, however have never had any issues and it's been perfectly stable.

It's a real hassle setting up dual/tri boot on GPT, on one disk, which is why I use many disks. Of course you have a laptop, not a desktop.
 
Lol, I'm trying this out right now and mistakenly installed grub2 to the MBR instead of /dev/sda4. The funny part is grub2 actually booted my OSX partition all the way to the Desktop :D

This is a bit of a ball ache though so I might end up just putting OS X on a slower 160GB drive although I would prefer to run Win7, OSX & Linux off one 250GB disk.
 
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ponder said:
Lol, I'm trying this out right now and mistakenly installed grub2 to the MBR instead of /dev/sda4. The funny part is grub2 actually booted my OSX partition all the way to the Desktop
Click to expand...

Interesting. From all the reading I did it wasn't clear weather OSX would boot from grub2 - mostly because most write-ups refer to grub2 as grub, so it's hard to tell. So I just removed grub2 and installed grub1 into my linux partition, and let Chameleon boot the individual partitions.

ponder said:
This is a bit of a ball ache though so I might end up just putting OS X on a slower 160GB drive although I would prefer to run Win7, OSX & Linux off one 250GB disk.
Click to expand...

I don't really have a choice - the netbook only has space for one drive...
 
koffiejunkie said:
I don't really have a choice - the netbook only has space for one drive...
Click to expand...

I just borked my single drive setup, SuperDupering the OSX partition now and I'm going to try again.... Realised my 160GB is full of backup stuff...
 
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