Triple Boot - Leopard, Snow Leopard & Win 7

Hello;
I have a Macbook Pro5,5 (unibody aluminum late 2009). I used disk utility as a simple process of partitioning so I could dual boot Leopard and Snow Leopard.
Is it possible to triple boot Leopard, Snow Leopard and Windows 7 x64?
I want to use it for specific testing at work and do "not" want to use a vmware solution.
Thanks

Hello
I just came across this
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16073483#16073483
snow leopard, lion and windows 7 discussion
I reckon the principle is the same
Stevie

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I want to triple boot Have Snow Leopard and XP on separate drives and I want Windows 7 on another drive, can it be done by temporarily removing the xp drive and installing windows 7 on another internal drive?

I want to triple boot my Mac Pro I have Snow Leopard and XP on separate drives (osx on drive 1, xp on drive 2) and I want Windows 7 on another drive (drive 4, drive 3 is used by osx for storage), can it be done by temporarily removing the xp drive and installing windows 7 on drive 4?
I realise bootcamp only allows 2 operating systems and refit could change the size of my current xp drive to accomodate W7, that is not an option here for various reasons one being the drive is pretty much at capacity with only about 30gig free (I work with video so that free space fluctautes quite a bit). I have a brand new drive 4 with 1TB set aside ready for W7 but I'm unsure how to go ahead?
any help or advice would be really appreciated, thanks

Boot Camp is used to support Windows on the same drive.
You can have a different OS on every drive.
You could have Windows 7, Vista, and XP all on one drive if you so choose.
I recommend not putting Windows and OS X on the same dirve when talking about Mac Pro - unless you just need something small and lite.
Remove all your other drives while you install Windows 7.
You could even relocate XP - if you need it even - or recover the hard drive space.
You should always keep 30% free for Mac OS; same for data/media drives.
Considering 1.5TB WD Black $110.... and you want OS X to be on a fast high performance drive as well.

Triple Boot; Mavericks, Snow Leopard & Windows 7

Hello
Has anyone had experience of creating an installation that can triple boot, Snow Leopard, Mavericks & Windows 7?
I have software that can only run 10.6.8, some that will only run 10.7 or beyond and some Windows only. I'd like to use a single machine.
Many thanks in advance.
Stevie

Hello
I just came across this
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16073483#16073483
snow leopard, lion and windows 7 discussion
I reckon the principle is the same
Stevie

I currently run Mac Pro with three hard drives. Can I dual boot or even triple boot with Snow Leaopard on one drive and Mountain Lion or Lion on others?

I currently run Mac Pro with three hard drives. Can I dual boot or even triple boot with Snow Leopard on one drive and Mountain Lion or Lion on others?
I need to keep Snow Leopard so that I can run some old softward.

If you are careful you can put at least two on one drive, having Recovery from Lion and Mountain Lion on their own drives though.
CCC can clone Lion Recovery - great for moving or backup.

Replaced faulty hard drive now can't boot from Snow Leopard.

Hi there,
As it says I replaced my internal WD 250gb drive in my late 2006 2.16ghz imac . I followed the tutorials on the net to the tee yet upon trying to boot from Snow Leopard after firing it back up all I get is the Apple logo and the timer . I've tried holding C to no avail . I've held Alt to select the OSX disc yet it still won't boot to get me to Disc Utility . I've even put the old hard drive back in . When I hold Alt on start up it shows the drive and the disc but will boot from neither when selected . I've tried to get the Snow Leopard disc to eject so I can try my originals but it won't even do that . I'm convinced I haven't damaged anything but I'm at my wits end ! Does anybody have any ideas how to get the Leopard disc out so I can at least try from my originals ? The drive I've installed is compatible it's a 1tb WD . I also triple checked all the connections and they all seam sound . Really appreciate your help lads as I wanted to give the iMac to my daughter when we get a new one .

You will first need to prep the new drive using Disk Utility on the original 10.4 Disc or Retail upgrade 10.6 DVD. It needs to be Partition GUID Partition Table and Format it Mac OS Extented (Journaled) before you can install and run OS X on it.
1. Boot from your SL install DVD or Bootable Clone and open Disk Utility.
2. Highlight the new HD in the list of drives and select the Partition tab.
3. Under Volume Scheme select 1 Partition and click on the Options... button.
4. Select GUID Partition Table in the drop down window and click OK.
5. Set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and click the Apply button.
6. Once thats done, then you can do a clean Install, Restore from TM or a Bootable Clone.

I have a MacBook Pro 15" and my warranty just ran out! I partitioned my harddrive into two partitions, one with Snow Leopard and the other with microsoft.This morning I turned on my Macbook Pro and it will not boot into Snow Leopard.

Good Morning,
I have a MacBook Pro 15" and my warranty just ran out! I partitioned my harddrive into two partitions, one with Snow Leopard and the other with microsoft.This morning I turned on my Macbook Pro and it will not boot into Snow Leopard. I shut it off took out the battery, reinstalled the battery. Then I put in the Snow Leopard CD and booted up to disk utility and The Snow Leopard partion would not show up?? I do see the microsoft partion.
I also rebooted holding down the shift key and still no Snow Leopard
Could you please tell me what I can do, what keys do I press on restart any advice to get Snow leopard back.
thank you.

Have you restarted holding down the Opt key? That procedure should give you a gray screen with all of the partitions that exist. Then select the SL partition for boot. Also go to System Preferences and Startup Disk, unlock the lock and select the SL partition as the default boot partition, then relock.

My iMac will not boot through Snow Leopard but will boot through Windows OS

My 2010 iMac will not boot in Snow Leopard, only Windows. Have tried reinstalling Snow leopard a few times and works only for a couple of minutes before freezing and doesnt reboot. Windows works perfect. Snow leopard just doesnt want to boot up past the Apple Logo. It was working fine one day and the next day it froze up and was able to reboot back into Snow Leopard but kept freezing. Now it doesnt load at all into Mac OS.
Brian

Possible scenarios:
1: The 10.6.3 SL retail disk is bad, it happens.
2: Your not using the 10.6.3 SL retail disk but one from another machine which doesn't have the drivers for that machine.
3: Your optical drive is funky or some other hardware issues.
4: Your trying to install 10.6 onto a PowerPC based Mac, no can do.
5: Your not using a wired keyboard for boot key commands, have some other hardware conflicts.
Possible solutions.
1: Copy the SL 10.6.3 disk using Disk Utility to another DVD, the error checking may resolve the original disk's issue.
http://www.brokenhomeboy.co.uk/pierow/blog/2011/10/make-a-bootable-backup-snow-l eopard-install-disc/
2: Make a SL bootable USB
http://www.maciverse.com/install-os-x-snow-leopard-from-usb-flash-drive.html
3: Call Apple for a new 10.6.3 disk (and make copies for backup before Apple discontinues selling it)
If your upgrading to 10.6 to get to 10.6.8 to upgrade to 10.7, be warned of this:
1: Your 10.5 software will not work in 10.7, no more Rosetta or PPC based code.
2: Your hardware will not qualify if it's a 32 bit Intel Core Duo, also you may experience slowdowns in performance over 10.6 (10.6 is the fastest OS X version for Intel Macs) in older Intel hardware (I suggest Early 2011 Mac's and later only for Lion)
3: Mountain Lion 10.8 is reportingly coming out this summer and will not run on a lot of older Intel based Mac's because of heftier graphics requirements.
4: 10.6 has the widest range of current avaialble software and drivers for third party hardware.
My advice, stick with 10.6.8 and stay there, buy a new Mountain Lion machine after this summer. Skip Lion completely.

Mac Pro will not boot with Snow Leopard - need help!

I have had a lot of issues with Snow Leopard since I upgraded from 10.5.8. Most of my problems started after installing Office 2007. I finally wiped the hard drive and reinstalled everything. No problems until last week. Start up was taking longer and had to reboot a couple of times because of grey screen. So I would just put computer to sleep. Yesterday the computer was frozen on screen saver with scrambled rows of pixels on screen two and the main monitor had a frozen image.
I initially pulled all peripherals out and pulled the power plug for 5 minutes. I have left the peripherals out and pulled the second monitor as well. I tried pulling the power plug during a few more starts but nothing gets me to a complete start up screen.
I have tried resetting PRAM and VRAM and tried a safe boot. I tried booting from Snow Leopard and my Leopard disk stayed on either a blue or gray screen with spinning beach ball (on gray screen).
Put original install disk in and booted from using D to check the hardware. Good news is that the hardware test was OK. I did the extended test.
All different kind of start up problems.
- Some start with start up sound goes to Apple logo to blue screen to grey screen with beachball
- Some start ups with no initial sound then Apple logo to blue screen to grey screen with no cursor or beachball
- Some start ups with no sound to gray screen to blue screen to grey screen.
I have no problem wiping the HD1 again but I can't even get the OS disk to be recognized with holding the C key during start up. This last time it went to a blue screen (holding the C key) and a cursor.
I don't know what else to do - Please help!!!

There are lists (MacIntouch and MacFixit) of hardware / software support issues with 10.6. Accelerateyourmac is another place to watch.
There were some really long threads back in Sept about printer driver support.
The 7300 firmware was more about Windows support; those cards are failing and dropping like flies (how DO they know 3 yrs has expired anyway?) and they don't support SL features like OpenCL etc so I'd invest in ATI 4870, best graphic card and works in all models Mac Pro.
Lots and lots of bootable clones for backup. Never need to wipe and install again.

Dual Boot with Snow Leopard and Mavericks not possible?

I have a Early 2011 Macbook Pro with 2,3 GHz i7 Quad and two 512 GB SSDs (the secondary disk in an optical drive bay enclosure). This Macbook Pro can run Snow Leopard and Mavericks on the primary disk without problems. When I try to set up a dual boot system however, problems appear and it looks like it is not possible. When I start from Snow Leopard, I cannot select Mavericks as a start volume and vice versa. The error message says something like "Bless tool" cannot use this disk, i.e. unmount and boot from it. The problem remains when I exchange the disks (putting the primary disk in the drive enclosure and vice versa). When I put the secondary drive in an external case however, it is possible to boot from it - but strange things happen when the system starts: My computer clock is reset to 1/1/2001, WiFI passwords are not remembered for more than one session, disk permissions are reported as "repaired" but do apear as not repaired when I check them again - and other issues). I have verified both disks already and repaired permissions but that does not change the situation. So my experience is different from what is said in https://discussions.apple.com/thread/566781. It looks like the latest Mavericks cannot coexist with Snow Leopard on neiter a secondary internal drive nor on an external drive. This is strange since both disks and systems work flawless when run alone. Any suggestions to solve this problem?

When I check the Mavericks disk in the optical drive with disk utility after booting / running Snow Leopard on the primary disk I get som errors, see below ("disk utility Info"). So after all, I decided to erase the disk and install Mavericks new. But even erasing the disk is not possible when it is in the optical drive enclosure. I get this error message:
"Volume Erase failed with the error:
Could not unmount disk"
When I put this disk into an external case connected via USB however, it starts and runds MAvericks without any Problem. Same happens when I put thie Mavericks disk into the internal primary hard disk place.
"disk utility Info" when verinfying the secondary drive in the oprical bay:
Verifying volume “Samsung SSD Daten”
Performing live verification.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Unused node is not erased (node = 40)
Checking catalog file.
Unused node is not erased (node = 30)
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Unused node is not erased (node = 8)
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume bitmap needs minor repair for orphaned blocks
Checking volume information.
The volume Samsung SSD Daten was found corrupt and needs to be repaired.
Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.
Verify and Repair volume “Samsung SSD Daten”
Error: Could not unmount disk

Fastest mini to dual-boot Lion & Snow Leopard?

I do software testing and currently have an iMac set up so I can boot either Snow Leopard or Lion. For space reasons, I'd like to get rid of the iMac and get a mini instead, but it looks like the current models won't boot Snow Leopard (true??).
So what's the fastest older model that would serve my purposes. Or should I just forget about it?
Thx

Find a mid-2011 model that was delivered with Snow Leopard. You might be able to find one in the Apple refurbished systems on the Apple store web site, or possibly via an online retailer that still has stock.

Unable to set up a dual boot for Snow Leopard and Lion

I'm running an early 2011 MacBook Pro. I originally ran this machine with Snow leopard for quite a while. I've got 8 GB RAM and lots of free space on my hard drive. I upgraded to Lion and it works well. But I want to boot to Snow Leopard from an external drive to run some old Rosetta apps. However, I couldn't run the Snow Leopard installation disk on the Lion Machine. When I tried to boot to the installation disk, I would get a beeping sound during startup, three beeps in a row - repeating, and it would not boot. So I connected the external to another machine running Snow Leopard and I installed a new version of Snow Leopard on the external drive. But my Lion machine will not boot from that external. I am able to select the Snow Leopard drive in the Start Up Disk pane in the prefs. But when I restart, I just get the three beeps. I must be missing something here. Any help would be appreciated.

Not in cases when the computer successfully boots to one OS but produces three beeps when an attempt is made to boot it to another. If it really was a RAM problem that serious, the computer wouldn't get as far as checking the OS version, and it has no problems booting Lion. In the event of a minor RAM problem, it wouldn't produce three beeps like that at all.
(67955)

Anyone using a mini as a Leopard-Snow Leopard dual boot?

I have Leopard (10.5.8) and Snow Leopard (10.6.4) installed on my mini for dual booting, and when I reboot from Snow Leopard into Leopard, the video card output is completely distorted. I have to restart a second time in Leopard to resolve this.
Anyone else using a Leopard-Snow Leopard mini and are you having/not having display problems?
Note this might be specific to Snow Leopard 10.6.4.

A strange thing happened. When using Snow Leopard, I opened the desktop folder for the Leopard volume in icon view and moved some of the icons around.
Then when I rebooted into Leopard the display problem didn't happen (although there was still some weirdness with the blue screen being chopped up during bootup). I found all the icons on my Leopard desktop were de-arranged. I started manually rearranging them and then did "Clean Up Selection" on some, and the display problem suddenly occurred.
So this is looking like it might be something to do with the DS_Store file. My theory:
1. Snow Leopard does something to the video ROM that either:
— A. requires some new DS_Store format, or
— B. is just buggy with certain complex DS_Store data (note that I have ~100 icons on the Leopard desktop, carefully arranged and colored)
2. When I rearranged the icons in Snow Leopard, this either:
— A. wrote a Snow Leopard-style DS_Store file for the Leopard desktop, or
— B. just wrote a simpler DS_Store file that didn't have the problem complex data
3. Then back in Leopard when I fiddled with the icons, this wrote a new DS_Store file (either older Leopard format, or just more complex)
4. The video card was still in "Snow Leopard mode" at this point as I hadn't rebooted Leopard a second time, so the desktop display went distorted as soon as the new DS_Store file went into effect.
5. For some reason Leopard will write over the bad/new settings Snow Leopard writes to the video ROM, but only on the second restart.

Why can't brand new MacBookPro9,1 (OEM Mountain-Lion) boot from Snow Leopard on external drive, or internal partition?

Why can't brand new MacBookPro9,1 (OEM Mountain-Lion) boot from Snow Leopard on external drive, or internal partition?
Is this because of hardware changes? Or firmware changes? Or is it just and Apple Inc. administrative fiat?

@Steve Holton: Sorry Steve, but you're wrong about that one . I'm using 10.8 (purchased and downloaded) on the internal HD of this MBP8,3 (2.2 GHz, 17"), and I am also able to boot into 10.7.4 and 10.6.8 from external FW800 partitions.
However, I DO have problems with my MBP9,1. It came with 10.7.4 installed and ran fine. Then I purchased and installed 10.8. It ran fine but could no longer boot from 10.7.4 on an external partition. I then reinstalled 10.7.4 on the internal HD and discovered that it is still unable to boot (even 10.7.4) from an external FW800 partition.
One of Apple's Senior Support Advisors has done some remote troubleshooting but the case is still open and unresolved. An earlier Apple Support case suggested that when, I installed the downloaded copy of 10.8, there had been a "firmware update" (behind the scenes) that is now causing the problems with booting from my external partition(s). This apparently is "a bug": it is not what is supposed to happen.
So - I believe - "the problem" really has nothing to do with hardware capability. It is strictly about Apple's strategy for "managing its future customer base". If you don't like it - use something else - I am seriously considering Ubuntu as an alternative.
If there's a hidden caveat in all this it's probably "Read Appple's Licence Agreement VERY Carefully".

If I upgrade my Mac mini to Lion, can I still boot from Snow Leopard on another drive/partition?

If I upgrade my Mac mini to Lion, can I still boot from Snow Leopard if it is on another partition/drive?

Yes

IMac fell on the floor - Windows 7 boots up, Snow Leopard does not

Hello everyone
My first generation aluminium-intel-mac fell off a small stool I carelessly placed it on. Interestingly, pressing the option-key and booting up windows after turning on the power works just fine. Trying to boot up Snow Leopard however won't get me past the loading screen. Also, there's this odd clicking noise every few seconds.
I've tried the following:
Starting up in safe mode -> loading screen
Resetting NVRAM -> loading screen
Booting from the Snow Leopard Install disk -> loading screen
Help!

That odd clicking sound tells me you damaged your Hard Drive when you dropped it. Take it to an Authorized Apple Service Provider.

Triple Boot - Leopard, Snow Leopard & Win 7

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