Can I have 3 partitions with BootCamp?

sabor said:

I usually have a partition for the OS and a parition for my Users. When using the old method to install Windows, I could not have more than 2 partitions or it would not work.
With BootCamp, can I have 3 partitions or more? (one for system, one for users, and one for Windows. Has anyone tried this?
Thanks.

Click to expand...

Apple strongly implies in the docs that they do not support third party partitioners, and that the boot drive must be one partition.


BootCampers: Read The Docs First!

FAQs
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303572

Installation Guide
http://images.apple.com/macosx/bootc...etup_Guide.pdf

On my iMac I allocated 60GB. Once in the Windows installer, when the partition screen came up, I deleted the 60GB partition and made two 30GB ones instead.

Windows then went through the installing files part before the GUI and then rebooted but on reboot it said it was missing windows\system32\something.

So although I was able to create two partitions this way I don't think they were really useable. Someone else could have a go with a similar strategy and see if they can get further.

sabor said:

With BootCamp, can I have 3 partitions or more? (one for system, one for users, and one for Windows. Has anyone tried this?

Thanks.

Click to expand...

I had a similar question, but I wanted to know if you could partition for OS X, XP, and your favorite flavor of Linux.

My understanding is that Boot Camp is just a dynamic partition resizer. I might be wrong.

Anyway, if you want a partition for OS X, one for XP, and one for Linux (like I'm tempted to do), I believe all you would have to do is partition the disk into three chunks using Disk Utility while booted from the OS X install disk.

Of course, right now it looks like I'm going to have to reinstall my system from scratch because the Firmware updater apparently doesn't like my custom partition scheme as it currently stands.

So I might have to reinstall OS X with the boot drive as one partition, run the firmware updater, then reboot and repartition the drive into three slices (one HFS+ boot, one Free Space for Windows, and another HFS for Linux which can read such things) and reinstall OS X yet again.

I suspect that after that mess, it might work. This is the price we pay for pwning 8)

Could you do a 2 stage bootloader?

Split the "windows" partition into two while making Windows XP C: and Linux "D:". Install XP then install Linux and use the LILO (or something similar).