Wow – it’s late, so this may not come out so great.
What’s better than getting a dual-boot solution with 64-bit Vista and OS X on a Core 2 Duo laptop? How about triple-booting OS X, 64-bit Vista, and your favorite flavor of linux? (along with a shared ext3 drive so you can avoid using FAT32 or Boot Camp)
Before getting too much further and so you don’t waste your time, I’ll tell you a little secret: you can’t have all of the above quite yet, but you can get darned close. And I’d bet you’ll get this functionality within a few weeks – maybe by the time you’ve read this – stay tuned… Here’s where I’m at so far.
I’ve gone through the full installation of 64-bit Vista on a MacBook Pro Core2Duo… Followed by the installation of 32-bit Vista, and then reinstalling 64-bit again to make sure I wasn’t crazy.
64-bit:
1. Skip Boot Camp. You don’t need the drivers and it limits you to two partitions.
2. To get the triple-boot functionality, install rEFIt on OS X (http://refit.sourceforge.net/).
3. Use diskutil resizeVolume to resize the OS X partition and create the Linux and Windows partitions (go to the triple-boot tutorial link at the bottom of this post)
3. Insert and install Vista 64-bit disc.
4. Be impressed, it’s a smooth installation – Microsoft gives you most of the drivers you need, including the display, but not wifi (which is a deal breaker for me). Nobody seems to have a 64-bit signed driver for the Atheros AR5008 chipset.
* The ext2/3 drivers obviously won’t work on this 64-bit setup either.
** It’s sexy and fast. Maybe I’m overeager for 64-bit’s, but it really does feel smoother and faster than the 32-bit counterpart. Presumably Apple will have 64-bit drivers relatively soon (especially since their 32 bit versions don’t work with Vista either!?)
32-bit – better, but still not as good as 32-bit XP:
Simply follow the steps above, but with a 32-bit version of Vista. I followed the instructions here: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45113
The 32-bit verson leaves you without right-click trackpad support (as far as I’ve found thus far), but the wifi driver works great.
There ya go… triple-booting Vista 64-bit with multiple partitions.
The best resources I’ve found to date:
rEFIt: http://refit.sourceforge.net/ – great multi-boot tool for Macs, much better than the built in version and allows bypassing of bootcamp.
A couple other experiences with 64-bit and 32-bit Vista installations: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45113
Triple-boot tutorial and walk-through: http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp
Ext2/3 support for Windows: http://www.fs-driver.org/
The above should get you nicely on your way. My conclusion is that it’ll be best to wait another week or two until Apple has Vista compatable drivers available. With the above instructions you can have a triple-booting system with a shared Ext2 partion.
Again, in the end, you have the following options:
1. OS X, Linux, Vista 64-bit – no wifi, no Ext2/3 support for Vista (yet).
2. OS X, Linux, Vista x86 – wifi, no Ext2/3 for Vista (yet).
3. OS X, Linux, XP – wifi and Ext2/3 are great, but no Vista.