dual boot mavericks

I have done this. Having a separate partition allows you to "play" with Mavericks but with the peace of mind that you can always go back to ML. That is a big advantage. But then you will be booting left and right and you may or may not have all of your data under Mavericks. I see that as a slight disadvantage.

It is very easy to delete the Mavericks partition and resize your ML partition. Apple has made that process quite smooth.

I'm dual booting mavericks and lion. It works pretty well so far. I still need lion for some hardware that never got updated drivers for mountain lion. So by dual booting, I can still use that hardware when I need to (without having to buy another computer for it) - an obvious cost benefit. But as with any dual-booting systems, the disadvantage is that you have less drive space to use. I get around that by using an external hard drive as well (which is cheaper than buying another computer).

Does it mess with the ML recovery HD...?

I have 2 recovery partitions, one for lion and another one for mavericks. You should be able to have one for mountain lion and mavericks as well if those are the systems you are dual booting.

tywebb13 said:

I have 2 recovery partitions, one for lion and another one for mavericks. You should be able to have one for mountain lion and maverics as well if those are the systems you are dual booting.

Click to expand...

Can i select the Recovery OS partition with the option key?

yes.

you just hold down the option key when booting up.

4 things should show - your 2 systems, and the 2 recovery partitions for each system.

select the one you want and boot up from that.

if you made the mavericks partition from a usb, you can make the mavericks recovery partition using this method:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1595829/

oMc said:

Does it mess with the ML recovery HD...?

Click to expand...

I lost my recovery partition. Funny thing, when I went to Disk Utility to create a new partition for Mavericks, I used the handle to set it to about 64 GB. However, when it was done being created, it was basically half the size of my drive. I have a 256, so my original partition was down to like 130-ish and Mavericks took the rest.

I installed Mavericks fine, but then got tired of it, so I removed the second partition. However, now I lost my ML recovery partition. If I boot with ALT, I only have my one main boot volume. Not a biggie for me, as I'm doing a clean install when I get Mavericks. I also have a clone with the recovery partition still in-tact, as I just used it to do a disk repair.

So yeah, you may lose your ML recovery partition when setting up a dual-boot from the internal drive.

Dual Boot ... well Triple Boot

10.8.5 on Partition 1
10.9 on Partition 2
Windows 7 on Partition 3

I also have my Recovery Partitions for both ML and Mavericks.