12-13-2011, 11:28 AM

Hello.

First time on here because I have a situation that I am pretty sure can be solved...but google is not being that helpful at the moment.

I have a macbook that I would like to setup as a multiboot environment running lion, windows 7 and ubuntu(linux.)

I have successfully installed all three OS's, and am using rEFIt to switch between them...but my problem is this;

normally on any new comp, i create a large partition (the bulk of hard disk space, as a "Media" partition, to keep OS partitions smaller and have one place to put all of my personal stuff, allowing easy access, recovery, and a way to organize things across OS's. In the past I have only been doing this on a box with windows and linux...

I come up against a wall when trying to do this with a macbook though...creating the partitions in disk utility is easy enough....but there are issues...

When i partition the HD in disk utility with the lion cd, so that i have a partition for lion, one for windows, one for ubuntu, and one for swap space for ubuntu, and 1 for media...windows seems to recognize the smaller partition i have created for it's install....but refuses to recognize the media partition i have created because ( and this is the note the windows install disk says) "this hard drive already has the maximum partitions of this type."

Note:the windows disk shows all of the partitions on the hd apart from the two linux partitions...i think just because it doesn't recognize the filesystems, but they are there....and function as advertised.

Now, I know there are differences in partition tables....macbooks using the guid...not really sure what windows uses by default...nor what ubuntu uses....

Can anyone give me some pointers on how to successfully partition my HD so that I can share a NTFS "media" partition across OS's?

Forgive me if this thread is in the wrong location, and thanks in advance!

12-13-2011, 08:47 PM

You're probably forgetting that Lion has an additional hidden partition called the "Recovery" partition. I would eliminate the Ubuntu swap partition as it's likely not needed anyway and try again. I've run Ubuntu and other distros of Linux for years and have never used a swap or home partition. Ubuntu will work fine with just a system partition.