Triple boot - Need some advice on whether there is any point in taking the risk!

[MBPFTW]

Hi guys!

1st post, but I've used the site often as an information resource!

never felt the need to post until now, i know there are a lot of clued up people on this site, and i wandered if i could pick your brains and also seek your advice.

Ok, at the moment i am running os x leopard 10.5.8 with a 32 gb windows boot camp partition. i also use this partition with parallels with no trouble at all, and everything works seemlessly. I also run a program called rEFIt to make the boot selection much less of a headache.

I've recently acquired windows 7, and have looked into perhaps triple booting the mac with os x, xp & 7! a nice thought, I'm in the process now of backing up my machine using time machine, and would like some advice from this point.

There alot of posts and tutorials of people who've triple booted with os x windows and linux (Ubuntu), but not many with two versions of windows. what i would like to do is partition my os x partition by another 32 Gb without destroying any data, I'm scared to do this in case i split data or ruin the setup i have now which works.

What I'd like to know is, if i partition my os x drive on my internal drive will i loose data? if i install 7 onto this manually partitioned drive, will i ruin the boot camp partition i've already got working fine?

Advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[ayeying]

If you're using reFit, then it should be as simple as partitioning the drive into 3, install OSX then XP then Windows 7.

Or resize OSX, create another partition, install Windows 7.

reFit should be able to pick up the different partitions

Unless I'm missing something.... that's what I would do.

 

[MBPFTW]

Thanks for the quick reply,

i just wandered whether resizing my os x partition with data on it will affect the data? yea in my head it seems simple, i just don't want to loose anything important!

 

[MBPFTW]

O yea,

i probably should of stated that i want to avoid the headache of formatting the hard drive, its taken alot of tinkering to get it the point it's at now and i dont want to go through it again out of choice!

 

[balamw]

You should never take on a major restructuring of your hard drive without a full, complete and tested backup. You can't lose anything if you have a backup.

That said, you can resize HFS+ partitions non-destructively in Disk Utility very nicely. The only limits are if your drive is fairly full you may run into some unmovable files that won't let it resize your partition.

B

 

[MBPFTW]

Yea,

thats the answer i needed!

I'm guessin time machine is a suffuceint back up device? I've never used it before, but from what i can tell it creates a restore point if all goes horribly wrong, i can just format the drive and pick up where i left off, after a fresh install?

 

[balamw]

I'm a belt an suspenders kinda guy when it comes to backup so, i'd probably supplement a Time Machine backup with one from Carbon Copy Cloner just to be sure. Given how cheap HDDs are $50-$100 for a little piece of mind is well worth it.

B

 

[MBPFTW]

Yea nice advice,

i really dont want this to be a headache! in all fairness im only doing it for personal glory! I'm an OS X user though and through, just thought it would be something to basque in my mac user heaven when i see people using their PC's!

just one question, will manually partitioning my os x sector affect my xp boot camp? it's just there's a warning on disk utility that it could mess things up?

 

[balamw]

rEFIt deals with the possible issues of multiple partitions.

B