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- Jan 25, 2010
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- Location
- Toronto, ON
- Your Mac's Specs
- 24" iMac - 2.8 GHz Core Extreme, 4 GB RAM, 2 TB RAID Array
Well, I'm seriously thinking about getting a triple boot going on my 24" iMac, but before I do, I've got a few questions.
1. Does anyone here have any experience with triple booting (specifically to the install process). I'm pretty computer literate, but there's a few installation specific things that are making me a little nervous.
2. The reason I'm getting nervous about these things is my past experience with editing the partition table on my Mac. When I was attempting to get Ubuntu booting, I over-wrote my entire internal hard drive *Doh*. Good thing I had Time Machine backups on a separate drive. The second time, I installed the GRUB bootloader to the internal drive and it over-wrote my EFI bootloader, thus making my beautiful Mac a Linux only machine. Double hooray for Time Machine backups.
Would using the newest version of Boot Camp to partition again and install Windows 7 create similar problems? The specific thing I'm worried about is when the Windows setup decides to install the Win 7 bootloader to the root of my drive. Will this over-write my existing setup, and thus make me start from scratch all over again?
If so, I'm comfortable with doing a full drive format and recovering from Time Machine. However, this brings up new concerns. If I complete the Windows install process, over-write my Mac and Linux partitions, and then choose to format, will my Win 7 serial number work again?
Thanks for any help you can provide.
1. Does anyone here have any experience with triple booting (specifically to the install process). I'm pretty computer literate, but there's a few installation specific things that are making me a little nervous.
2. The reason I'm getting nervous about these things is my past experience with editing the partition table on my Mac. When I was attempting to get Ubuntu booting, I over-wrote my entire internal hard drive *Doh*. Good thing I had Time Machine backups on a separate drive. The second time, I installed the GRUB bootloader to the internal drive and it over-wrote my EFI bootloader, thus making my beautiful Mac a Linux only machine. Double hooray for Time Machine backups.
Would using the newest version of Boot Camp to partition again and install Windows 7 create similar problems? The specific thing I'm worried about is when the Windows setup decides to install the Win 7 bootloader to the root of my drive. Will this over-write my existing setup, and thus make me start from scratch all over again?
If so, I'm comfortable with doing a full drive format and recovering from Time Machine. However, this brings up new concerns. If I complete the Windows install process, over-write my Mac and Linux partitions, and then choose to format, will my Win 7 serial number work again?
Thanks for any help you can provide.