Triple Boot MacBook Pro Part One: Configuring Your Disks

Print | posted on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 1:31 AM

This article is part one in a series, read the introduction here.

1. Make sure your Mac is connected to AC Power, power up your Mac and login.
2. Insert the Mac OS Install Disc 1 into your Mac.
3. From the Apple menu choose Restart... and click Restart.
4. Hold down the ALT/OPTION key while the machine boots.
5. When the Boot Picker screen appears, select the CD ROM icon labelled Mac OS X Install Disk 1 and wait while Mac OS loads.
    
6. On the Mac OS X dialog, select your Language and click the button.
   
7. When the Welcome page appears, from the Utilities menu, select Disk Utility...
    
8. Within Disk Utility, select the Hard Disk (186.3 GB Hitachi HTS...) and click the Partition button/tab.
   
9. In the Volume Scheme drop down select 3 Partitions.
   
10. Click the Untitled 1 partition and in the Name text box enter Macintosh HD, ensure that Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is selected as the Format and enter 59.00 in the Size text box.
     
11. Click the Untitled 2 partition and in the Name text box enter VISTA, select MS-DOS (FAT) as the Format and enter 100.00 in the Size text box.
    
    
    Note: We will format the two Windows partitions as NTFS when we install Windows as we are not able to using Disk Utility. Also note that the labels will be overwritten, but entering them here helps to avoid mistakes later on. Also the final size of the 2K8 (3rd) partition will be slightly less after the partition and format is complete.
    
12. Click the Untitled 3 partition and in the Name text box enter 2K8, select MS-DOS (FAT) as the Format and note that the remaining space (27.31GB) is automatically entered.
    
13. Once you are happy with the partition sizes, click the Apply button and on the confirmation dialog, click Partition.
    
14. Wait while the changes are applied, and then quit Disk Utility by pressing Command-Q. You will be returned to the Welcome page.