mutiboot storage partition issues

[CamisBoss]

Hello all. I'm currently triple-booting my macbook pro. It was pretty tricky to get it up and running, but all my OS's are running well now on the same internal disk.

I have a large internal hard disk, so I created an extra storage partition hoping I could format it as a FAT32 so all three OS's could use it. While OSX and Ubuntu both read and write it fine, Windows 7 just sees it as unallocated space. When I tried to reformat it while in Windows 7, Disk Management gave me a warning saying that the operation would convert my disk to a dynamic disk and that I wouldn't be able to boot other OS's off of it.

I was hoping some of you might be able to give me a few pointers as to how I could get this working!

When I run 'diskutil list' in OSX, this is what I get:

  #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *640.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            454.1 GB   disk0s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data                         50.0 GB    disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data Windows                 100.0 GB   disk0s4
   5:       Microsoft Basic Data STORAGE                 30.4 GB    disk0s5
   6:                 Linux Swap                         4.1 GB     disk0s6

The 50GB partition is my Ubuntu partition

 

[balamw]

I was hoping some of you might be able to give me a few pointers as to how I could get this working!

This is always tricky 'cause even though Windows 7 64 bit supports GPT now it seems to still do a lot differently from MacOS or Linux. In some ways it still seems to require the MBR to be there as well and of course the MBR is limited to 4 partitions total, including the EFI partition.

The rEFIt source has a nice tool called showpart in it which you can compile on your own or download the version I posted here and gives IMHO a better picture of the two partition tables.

B

 

[CamisBoss]

Thanks. Here is what showpart displays. It looks like the storage partition isn't even on the MBR partition table. Is this because of the 4 partition limit? Any way I could get around that, like by using an extended partition or something?

Current GPT partition table:
 #      Start LBA      End LBA  Type
 1             40       409639  EFI System (FAT)
 2         409640    887337095  Mac OS X HFS+
 3      887601152    985253887  Basic Data
 4      985253888   1180567551  Basic Data
 5     1180567552   1240038254  Basic Data
 6     1242255360   1250263039  Linux Swap

Current MBR partition table:
 # A    Start LBA      End LBA  Type
 1              1       409639  ee  EFI Protective
 2         409640    887337095  af  Mac OS X HFS+
 3      887601152    985253887  83  Linux
 4 *    985253888   1183229951  07  NTFS/HPFS

MBR contents:
 Boot Code: Unknown, but bootable

Partition at LBA 40:
 Boot Code: None (Non-system disk message)
 File System: FAT32
 Listed in GPT as partition 1, type EFI System (FAT)

Partition at LBA 409640:
 Boot Code: None
 File System: HFS Extended (HFS+)
 Listed in GPT as partition 2, type Mac OS X HFS+
 Listed in MBR as partition 2, type af  Mac OS X HFS+

Partition at LBA 887601152:
 Boot Code: GRUB
 File System: ext3
 Listed in GPT as partition 3, type Basic Data
 Listed in MBR as partition 3, type 83  Linux

Partition at LBA 985253888:
 Boot Code: Windows BOOTMGR (Vista)
 File System: NTFS
 Listed in GPT as partition 4, type Basic Data
 Listed in MBR as partition 4, type 07  NTFS/HPFS, active

Partition at LBA 1180567552:
 Boot Code: None (Non-system disk message)
 File System: FAT32
 Listed in GPT as partition 5, type Basic Data

Partition at LBA 1242255360:
 Boot Code: None
 File System: Unknown
 Listed in GPT as partition 6, type Linux Swap