BEFORE STARTING, READ THESE THREE ITEMS:

- At many reboot steps, you need to hold down the alt/option key to give you your boot options of partitions or dvd's

- To work out a few driver issues in Vista, use boot camp (free from apple) to create the windows drivers cd but DO NOT use it to partition your drive or any of that other jazz. Just make the cd which you'll need later.

- If you have previously attempted to do this on your own, you'll know how big of a nightmare it is without the right information. I spent 3 tedious days (and nights) getting this to work. It was only after endless hours of web hunting, forum streaking, partition messups, and tears that I was able to accomplish this on my Macbook Pro. If you want to try this same tutorial on your MacBook , iMac, and so on... be my guest.

And... go!

1. 1.Install OS X (Tiger or Leopard) on a fresh mac-os-extended (HFS) partition and install the the latest OS X update with the software update utility
   

2. 2.Run the following diskutil resizeVolume command (with sudo) in the osx terminal (according to your hard drive size) which resizes your osx partition and adds 2 others with the windows partition last (osx: hfs   linux: ms-dos fat32   vista: ms-dos fat32)  Both Fat32 partitions will be converted later.  So, run it like the following (except you'll need to split up the sizes according to "YOUR" hard drive... and don't go over):
   

(before running this command, check the list of partitions.  disk0s2 is most likely the main partition name. To find out type: 'diskutil list' and verify the name as well as the fact that there should be one EFI partition (disk0s1) and then your OS X partition(disk0s2)

now...

command$ sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 75G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Linux" 15G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Windows" 20G

(after it does its thing... run "diskutil list" again to verify that it worked right)

3. (while pressing alt) Reboot with the Vista DVD in the drive. Install vista on the correct partition(should be sda4 or hda4) Don't worry if Vista doesn't finish all the way or won't boot all the way yet. Just get as far as you can in the installation and then go to the next step.

4. (while pressing alt) Reboot and install Fedora 8 from the dvd(burn the Fedora ISO to an actual dvd) Make sure it's also installed on the right partition and during installation, install the grub bootloader when it asks. Make sure grub is installed on the linux partition and NOT the base of the hdd (for example: sda3 instead of sda)

6. 6.Don't worry about any problems with Fedora not working perfectly either because vista and Fedora most definitely won't work or boot yet due to a range of problems between file systems, boot loaders, operating-system greediness and so on...
   

7. Boot into OS X and download a program called rEFIt and extract the files to the root directory in OSX (for example: Macintosh HD, just put the "extracted" files right in there and then...

8. Open up the terminal (still in osx) and cd into /efi/refit directory and then run ./enable.sh, it will ask for your password and bam, you have the refit boot screen loader for your mac making it possible to see all your installed partitions at startup (by pressing the alt/option key and selecting the rEFIt logo) and OS's (even though they're not all working yet)

9. 9.(while pressing alt) Boot into the Fedora 8 DVD and select “Rescue Installed System” at the menu.  Get to the prompt (skipping the disk check and the ethernet setup) and confirm when it asks to ‘mount the system installation’
   

10. Once at the prompt, chroot to /mnt/sysimage

11. cd into /boot/grub and type: cp grub.conf grub.conf.backup (for a backup) and then type: nano grub.conf

12. In nano, add the following “to the bottom” (and don't save just yet):

title Vista at sda4

rootnoverify (hd0,3)

savedefault

makeactive

chainloader +1

(this is where the magic occurs allowing grub to point to the windows MBR on boot... but we're not done)

13. Ctrl-x and confirm with " y " to overwrite the existing file

14. Go back to root ( cd / ) and type: fdisk /dev/sda (that's a space after fdisk)

15. Enter option: " t " ... and then partition number " 4 " (the windows partition number) and then the id number " 7 " (which changes the vista partition to an HPFS/NTFS partition id) Then type " w " to write the changes to the drive - This will save you from a windows booting error when the filesystem ID's clash -

16. Type exit twice to reboot

17. 17.(while pressing alt) Reboot and DO NOT ENTER THE rEFIt MENU and then... eject the linux dvd and insert the windows dvd.   
    

18. 18.Boot into the windows dvd and after choosing the language, click on "repair" instead of install and just follow each step. It will automatically find a windows startup problem and fix it automatically (it should detect it the first time, if it doesn’t, reboot and try it again)
    

19. After vista is repaired and the computer restarts, take out the DVD, select the rEFIt menu, and if you did everything correctly (and in the right order)...choose any OS and VOILA! You should have a triplebooting machine!!!

20. And now, for those windows drivers from the cd you made. This used to be a more complicated process but then came Boot Camp 1.4   Now, you just put it in, start the autorun.exe and you’re done.  Everything will work including your iSight and apple remote (works with iTunes).

Getting everything in Linux to work...

1. -Fedora 8 will install everything pretty nicely except for some important things such as your video driver, wifi, things that that.  For a complete tutorial on how to get everything working on a Macbook Pro, look at my other blog “Fedora8 Compiz-Fusion Tutorial”.
   

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