Getting Started

Lots of guides out there on triple-booting with Apple hardware. Since this blog is all about redundancy, why not beat the triple-booting dead horse some more?

I’ll talking about (a):

• MacBook Pro 4,1 (early 2008)
• OS X Snow Leopard
• Windows Vista Home Premium
• Arch Linux 2009.08
• GParted Live 0.4.6-1
• External hard drives

From the very beginning

You’ll want to back up your data. If you’re bold and/or don’t care, skip this section. The following are tips to help you preserve your old files:

• Windows
  • I achived this easiest by…

About external hard drives

In relation to NTFS, there’s known issues with transferring NTFS partitions to GPT hard drives if using GParted Live CD. The issue comes from the partition receiving the MSFTRES (MS Reserved) flag, which cannot be toggled using the graphical GParted or Parted (CLI). Now there are a few sites that people point out to each other like this article from Mac OS X Hints. That information is old (to me) and has lots of mindless confusion and voodoo magic, in my opinion.

Now, there is a project out there called GPT fdisk, or “gdisk” for OS X and Linux. It will succeed in toggling the MSFTRES flag on NTFS partitions that were moved to a GPT hard drive using GParted Live.