Multipartition Bootcamp

I have pretty much always lived with at least two OS partitions and one data partition, because I’m always testing some kind of pre-release OS or side-by-side testing app functionality on multiple OSes. Thus I want to be able to share applications and application data between the two OSes on the data partition. The advent of Bootcamp got me to give up my standard operating procedures to test drive running Windows on my laptop. It was great! Well, as great as running Windows is. I could have stayed there, even to the point of using MacDrive to treat my HFS+ Mac boot volume as combination boot volume and data disk between Mac and Windows... but no, I got greedy.

Having looked at first this post, and then later this hint, I decided to bring back multiple boot partitions. I tried using the disk utility mechanism to resize the volumes to no avail. I think it always corrupted the MBR that the bootcamp utility set up. I ended up buying iPartition and playing around with it a bunch, but most of my edits would cause Windows to no longer boot either. However, I did manage to come up with an order of operations that makes it work.

1. Boot from your Leopard disk into its copy of Disk Utility.


2. Format the disk as HFS+Journaled entirely


3. Install Leopard.


4. From Leopard, run Bootcamp.


5. Resize the partition that Bootcamp suggests so that the Leopard partition is the size you ultimately want it to be, and that Windows takes up the rest.


6. At this point, instead of rebooting and installing Windows, I booted onto a external USB drive with iPartition installed. (You could boot onto the iPartition boot CD instead.)


7. Using iPartition, I shrank the Windows partition to its ultimate size, and added after it two extra HFS+J partitions for my other OS partition and my data partition.


8. I put in the Windows Vista RTM DVD and rebooted holding down “C” to install Vista. It saw the shrunken partition, let me reformat it, and installed.

[These instructions are specifically for starting from scratch. If you’re trying to do this with pre-existing volumes, I suggest backing them all up to an external device using Disk Utility or better yet, Carbon Copy Cloner, and WinClone for bootcamp partitions. You should then be able to restore after the partitions have been finally resized. You may have to still boot from a Windows disk if only to format the bootcamp partition as NTFS (and not bother installing further) before WinClone can restore your backup.]

The only thing that is somewhat frustrating about this now is that, even though I can boot between Tiger, Leopard, and Vista, as far as Vista is concerned, the drive (disk0) is a MBR drive and has three main partitions, the EFI partition, the Leopard partition, and the Vista partition; the remaining space is “unused”. Disk Utility while booted into Mac OS X, on th e other hand, happily lists the other partitions. This isn’t usually annoying, but MacDrive only sees and can mount the Leopard partition. (Mediafour claims the the partition maps “are incorrect or damaged beyond MacDrive’s ability to handle.”) So if I wanted to still have an available-to-Windows data drive, I’m going to have to back up everything, and restart these instructions, only making the original Leopard partition large enough to accommodate the data partition, and move the ultimately Leopard partition to the end. *sigh*

If you all have better options, please let me know.

P.S., Since all this, yet another post describes how to do this, and add linux to the mix.