Tri-Boot Refresh - Mountain Lion, Windows 8 and Fedora 18

This post has been a long time coming. Over the course of several months I spent the odd morning here and there attempting to build a new tri-boot machine for myself. My previous machine was still running Snow Leopard, Windows 7 and Fedora 14 and in dire need of upgrading. However, I was certain that an upgrade of OS X would destroy my carefully constructed partition table, which is why I opted to build a new machine so as to be able to continue to do my job!

Now, you might be wondering why it took so long for me to implement such a system, especially as I had already been through the process once before. The delay was caused by my initial insistence on a pure EFI/GPT booting solution; I wanted all three operating systems to boot via EFI and not rely on the Mac's hybrid GPT/MSDOS partition table and legacy boot options.

The main problem that I continually encountered was successfully booting Windows 8 via EFI. I tried several methods of installing the Microsoft OS, all of which failed to produce a bootable system:

• Booting directly off the DVD (by holding down although and selecting the "EFI" option). This resulted in the screen blanking and a spontaneous reboot before the installer even fully loaded.
• Following a well documented process that involved partitioning the disk using a WinPE environment and installing Windows via the dism tool that's distributed as part of the Microsoft Automated Deployment Kit. While this bypassed the initial Windows Setup step routine, I still experienced a similar issue; the screen blanked, the system rebooted and booting off the Windows partition again resulted in the following message:
  
  The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered and unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed. To install Windows, click "OK" to restart the computer, and the restart installation.
  
  Grabbing the minidump from the partition and parsing it through the WinDBG tool pointed the finger at the Intel integrated GPU driver igdkmd64.sys.
• After the above discovery, I tried tweaking hardware prior to booting the operating system by issuing commands in the EFI shell provided by rEFIt. Specifically, to try and force the Nvidia GPU to be active during the initial boot. This got me a little further through the install process, but still eventually resulted in a system crash caused by the igdkmd64.sys.
• As a final attempt, I followed a suggestion to strip out the integrated graphics drivers after deploying the OS image. However, this also proved unsuccessful, even when combining this method with the previous technique of modifying the hardware settings via EFI shell.

Even after all the above failures, I was still keen to get this triple boot implementation working, but I was finally convinced to let the idea drop when I read some notes from people who stated that audio was known not to work with Windows instances booting via EFI. Given that my primary reason for having a system that boots Windows was to play games, it would have been terrible to sacrifice audio for the sake of possible faster boot times!

The Installation Process

After I made the decision to resort to the hybrid GPT/msdos partition table method, installation was much the same as before, with a couple of extra steps to carry out during the Linux install. I'll do my best to detail the process here, in case there are any brave souls out there willing to give it a go! I shouldn't have to say this, but this is a destructive process, so be sure to back up anything important first and be aware that your mileage may very, depending on the Apple hardware you're using (my current machine is a MacBook Pro 6,2)

1. Boot from the OS X installation media and use Disk Utility to create the following partition scheme (these sizes can obviously be varied, depending on your priorities):
   1. Size: 80GB, label: "OS X", FS Type: HFS+, journaled, case sensitive (my personal preference, the default is case insensitive)
   2. Size: 250GB, label: "WINDOWS", FS Type: msdos
   3. Size: 1.07GB (the smallest sized partition the GUI driven Disk Utility tool is able to create), label "BOOT", FS type: msdos
   4. Size: 20GB, label: "ROOT", FS type: msdos
   5. Size: 229GB (the remaining space), label: "LVM", FS type: msdos
2. Exit Disk Utility and begin the installation, selecting the OS X partition when prompted.
3. A dialog box will appear warning that the File Vault (probably the Full Disk Encryption mode)and the Recovery Mode will not be available; probably due to the installer not wanting to trash the complex partition scheme. Confirm you're happy to live without these features to continue the installation routine.
4. Once OS X installed, install the rEFIt bootloader to facilitate booting the other operating systems and their installers. NB: it might take a reboot or two for the bootloader to appear.
5. Insert the Windows 8 DVD and reboot the machine.
6. Boot off Win 8 DVD by CD/DVD labelled "Windows". This boots the installer using the legacy/BIOS mode of the Mac.
7. Now, it may be possible at this point to follow the usual Windows installation routine; answering questions as prompted and clicking next. However, due to all the problems I had with trusting installation Wizards, I opted to hit Fn-shift-F10 to spawn a command prompt and perform the installation manually. Technically, just shift-F10 is the necessary key-combination to bring up a command prompt, but on a Mac the function keys are by default bound to other specific purposes (volume control, screen brightness, etc.), so using the Fn (or function) key is necessary to access the regular function keys.
   1. Run Microsoft's command line partitioning tool: diskpart
   2. To be sure of the installation drive, list the available disks: list disk
   3. Select the destination drive (usually disk 0): select disk 0
   4. List the available partitions to be sure the intended destination: list partition
   5. Select the destination partition (in this case, it should be number 3): select partition 3
   6. Format the partition as NTFS: format quick fs=ntfs label=Windows
   7. Exit the partition tool: exit
   8. Change directory to the root of the X: drive. This is necessary to access the version of the Dism tool that can apply the OS image: cd \
   9. Run the Dism tool to apply the Windows 8 image (in this case, the Professional edition):
      dism /apply-image /imagefile:d:\sources\install.wim /index:1 /applydir:c:\
   10. Change directory to the root of the new installation: c:
   11. Configure the Windows boot loader: bcdboot c:\Windows /l en-gb /s c:
   12. Exit/close the command prompt.
   13. Exit/close the Windows installer, which results in the Mac rebooting.
8. Select the icon of the Windows logo to boot into the OS and finalise the installation as per usual (configuring user accounts, etc.).
9. Eject the Windows DVD and insert the Fedora DVD.
10. Reboot.
11. Select the CD/DVD icon.
12. Once the installer has completed booting, switch to an alternative virtual console by pressing Fn+ctrl+alt+F3, as it is necessary to create the layout of your LVM volumes before continuing with the installer:
    1. Launch the LVM tool: lvm
    2. Designate the last partition on the disk as an LVM Physical Volume (PV): pvcreate /dev/sda6
    3. Create a volume group: vgcreate vg_fedora /dev/sda6
    4. Create a volume for the /tmp file system: lvcreate -L 1G -n tmp vg_fedora
    5. Create a volume for the /var file system: lvcreate -L 1G -n var vg_fedora
    6. Create a volume for the /home file system: lvcreate -L 1G -n home vg_fedora
    7. Exit the tool and return to the installer by pressing the keys Fn+alt+F7.
13. Proceed as normal through the installation, using the previously created 20GB partition for the root (/) volume and LVM volumes for their respective mount points. One very important note: when selecting the disk for installation, be sure to not install a bootloader, as per the instructions in the Fedora manual. During my initial attempts, this would always fail and prevent the installation from completing successfully; it needs to be carried out manually post-install.
14. Once the installer completes, allow it to reboot the system.
15. Select the CD/DVD icon.
16. At the Linux boot prompt, navigate to and select the rescue system option.
17. Let the rescue system boot, detect and mount the installed instance of Fedora.
18. Select the shell option to be dropped to the command line.
19. Change root to the mounted install: chroot /mnt/sysimage
20. Generate a GRUB configuration: grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
21. Install GRUB to the HDDs boot sector: grub2-install --recheck /dev/sda
22. Reboot and select the penguin icon to boot into Fedora and complete the initial setup of the OS.

If you've managed to follow all these steps, hopefully you're lucky enough to possess a triple boot machine! Some noteworthy points about the the above steps and the setup as a whole are as follows:

• If you run into a situation where either Windows or Fedora will not boot, it may be necessary to run the rEFIt sync tool. When booting it's one of the options below the available operating systems and it repairs the hybrid partition table after the use of a partitioning tool that's not aware of it's existence.
• After installing Fedora, trying to boot Windows via rEFIt will result in the GRUB bootloader appearing! However, the Windows install is an option here, simply select it to boot the OS.
• I found out about how to manually install GRUB by following steps I found on the Arch Linux wiki.

Feel free to sound off in the comments if you have anything to add, or you've tried the process yourself and hit a snag, I'd be happy to try and help.