OK so I finally made a blogger acct because, seeing as 95% of my friends aren't techno-dorks, it didn't make any sense to write about experiences (so that others can learn from them and it's not completely wasted time when something gets botched) in a myspace blog.
Anyways. quicklog: triplebooting macbook pro (2.2GHz, 2gb ram, 120gb hard drive)
used boot camp, added 32gb fat32 part for winxp pro
installed rEFIt (before or after windows i don't remember when?)
installed winxp pro
so far so good, (which means its not good enough though. :P)
tried to install ubuntu 7.10 x64. really annoying problems (no graphics during boot [only after], graphics resolution not working right, tried to set it right and it blanked out the screen until i hard-rebooted it. what an a-hole you are, x64.)
burnt and ran ubuntu 7.10 i686. muuuch better. (natively detected 1440x900 from the get-go)
install. (note: for 'advanced graphics' [probably referring to compiz/'beryl'] req. download of nVidia drivers, which req. inet connection)
deliberated over installing bootloader (grub). installed it anyways against my better judgement (note: major choice is merely a checkbox in an 'advanced...' type menu)
rebooted, osx works, yay.
rebooted, ubuntu works. (option-boot to 'windows' partition in mac efi loader, grub list pops up, pick ubuntu.)
rebooted, (rEFIt finally comes up? WTF? only now that there's 3 OS's it decides to work?) winxp w...ill probably end up broken. which sure as the crow flies south, it was. (missing or corrupt hal.dll file)
did some research. people have success (no mention of tri-boot though) wiping out win partition and re-doing it with NTFS. i was originally going to use ntfs and not fat32 but being able to write the winxp partition straight from osx was pretty tempting. very convenient.)
Tried to use boot camp assistant to restore back to a sole os x partition and have another go at it, but turns out boot camp won't touch it unless its either a osx-only or bootcamp-orthodox osx/xp setup. (at this point there's 5 partitions: mac os x efi, mac os x, win xp, linux, linux swap)
tried disk utility. disk utility will erase THE INSIDES whichever one i want. it
will burn to CD/DVD THE INSIDES (read 'data') of whichever partition i want. and
yet it can't actually remove or add a partition. Awesome, thanks so much.
Now my choices are:
a.) boot into OSX, remove rEFIt, and see if that lets bootcamp re-do the setup
b.) use the EFI-based fdisk tool via rEFIt to remove the offending partitions
c.) (back up personal data first) see if apple extended hardware diagnostic (an hour...sigh) detects awkward setup as a problem (as boot camp did...great engineers usually think alike) and offers to fix it
d.) (back up personal data first) boot off leopard CD and try and 'restore' things (last resort: wipe it clean with said CD)
Like I said, one of the benefits of trial-and-error is learning, and why keep it to myself? Hope this helps some people who might read this before going about it the wrong way.
Eventually I will figure out a cut-and-dry method to do this, so help me God.
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