rEFIt advice needed

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Hey!

I am getting my MacBook Pro next week, and was just looking for some information on triple-booting it with Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Windows 7.

The only guides I have found seem to be years old (and working with Vista, not 7), so I'm not completely sure if they are still relevant.

Could anyone possibly shed some light on the subject, about the go about it the proper way? I'm probably looking for a step-by-step guide or walkthrough etc.

I can also confirm I'm going to be working with rEFIt for this.

Thanks in advance,
Brendan
 
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Why do you need XP and 7? Anyway Windows 7 is 100% identical to Windows Vista, don't let tech pundits or marketing tell you otherwise. Same instructions will work. I'd say put 7 in Boot Camp and just run XP in Parallels. But this requires something crazy:

Purchase a license for Windows 7 Home Premium or higher.
Purchase a license for Windows XP Pro
Purchase Parallels.

Why not just run 7 in Boot Camp and let that be it? You can then run Virtual PC which is free if you need some XP crud.
 
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That was what I did originally have in mind, but it's not just simple applications that I want to run - a few graphics-intensive, but fairly old games that I know won't run in 7, and things like old versions of Cubase etc that require a dongle that doesn't want to play nice in 7.

I've already done my research, and have decided that this is the way to go. I need to run everything natively.

However, thankyou very much for your reply :) much appreciated!
 
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I'd say then just run XP in Boot Camp and not fiddle with 7. I dunno. I've used Windows for a total of about 8 hours since 1990, so I don't really know.
 
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I would like to stick with just XP to be honest. I just wanted 7 to keep up-to-date really. Plus I have a license for 7 that I haven't used yet, so just thought I'd stick on there to get used to it really, lol.

I may just follow a guide for Vista, and see how it works out.

If worst comes to worst, I can just re-installed Snow Leopard or something, can't I? I won't have any files or anything on yet.
 
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That's true! If you don't have any data to lose, then there's no harm. And heck, you'll learn a lot from doing it all! I went and looked at the rEFIt and it looks like it would do the work for you. I'd just be worried of whether it would interfere with the Macintosh's built in EFI. Ya know... EFI tries to boot rEFIt and then you try to boot OS X from rEFIt.

I dunno. I'm still not used to this crazy Intel world :/
 
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Don't use Bootcamp at all, use iPartition with ReFit. I have REfit on my machine, though I only have one additional partition, it's all the same. I don't like Bootcamp because it gives me errors a lot saying I can't make partitions and that my hard drive is bad, when it really isn't. iPartition is a whole lot better, and gives you more options for the partitions like shrink and grow. Look into it, they're a nice pair.
 
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Thanks for your replies.

@Jamie-Jamie, I'm new to the whole Mac world, so don't know a lot, but I'm sure it probably wouldn't interfere with Mac's EFI would it? Otherwise it'd make the system unstable or something, and no one would use it? I don't know - I'm just being over-reasoning.

@mknabster, you're saying to use iPartition over Disk Utility, right? I'll definately look into it, but is there any specific advantage using iPartition over Disk Utility? I only ask because iPartition isn't free....
 

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