{"id":1725,"date":"2013-11-01T16:24:47","date_gmt":"2013-11-01T21:24:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bitpost.com\/news\/?p=1725"},"modified":"2016-02-15T22:20:35","modified_gmt":"2016-02-16T03:20:35","slug":"quad-boot-windows-8-1-osx-mavericks-ubuntu-13-10-gentoo-on-a-macbook-pro-17-inch-mid-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitpost.com\/news\/2013\/quad-boot-windows-8-1-osx-mavericks-ubuntu-13-10-gentoo-on-a-macbook-pro-17-inch-mid-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Quad-boot Windows 8.1, OSX Mavericks, Ubuntu 13.10, gentoo on a Macbook Pro 17-inch Mid 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just updated my Macbook Pro, removing the Super Drive and adding an SSD, following this awesome, concise and precise video<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It was as good a time as any to refresh everything.<\/p>\n

Here’s the result:<\/p>\n

\"CHOOSE!\"<\/a>

These are a few of my favorite things…<\/p><\/div>\n

And here is the partitioning to get it done:<\/p>\n

\"quad-boot-partitions\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here are my highlights (cautionary tales, really) from the experience. I’m not taking the time to do a full writeup, since it was a specific upgrade, not a clean install, but add a comment if you have a specific question for me.<\/p>\n

In the Mac world, things went fairly smoothly, as usual, but there I just did a new install of Mavericks on a new partition of the SSD, so there wasn’t much to go wrong. From Lion, I added a partition on the ssd using Disk Utilities, I got Mavericks from the App Store (for free, thanks Apple!), and during installation, I clicked “show extra drives” and chose the new SSD. Easy as pie.<\/p>\n

REFit has been the glue that binds all these OSes together, and REFind<\/a> has taken over maintenance and is doing a great job. I installed that next, from a Mavericks terminal, using the simple [.\/install.sh] method. One thing of note, make sure you copy the drivers you need from the installation directory to \/EFI\/refind\/drivers_x64 right away, or you will be lacking in boot options. I used ext2, ext4, hfs+, iso.<\/p>\n

Windows 7 has been fine so far, and everyone, EVERYONE I know who has tried it hates Windows 8. So let’s upgrade! Seriously, I had heard 8.1 was a slight improvement. After using it for a while, I actually LIKE it, and I never say that about Microsoft products. You can hit Esc to get out of the nightmare that is the tile-based flash-like default desktop. Once you get your “good old fashioned” desktop back to working the way you like, you might actually like the silly tile thing – there is worse software out there, for sure.<\/p>\n

But just so I don’t lose my edge, I should add that Windows 8.1 was a huge waste of time. I installed 8.1 over 7 as an upgrade, and it apparently left my files in place, EXCEPT FOR INSTALLED APPLICATIONS, which completely disappeared without a warning and no trace was left. Like a bad magic trick. Oh, and using Windows to format ANY partition will take liberties with the first partition, TRASHING IT COMPLETELY, which forced me to reinstall Mavericks. Asses.<\/p>\n

So I took the time to update to Visual Studio 2013, which will have much-improved C++11 support anyway. That requires this SDK<\/a> as well, by the way.<\/p>\n

The default out-of-the-box Windows 8.1 drivers for my “MacBook Pro 17-inch, Mid 2009” were pretty sucky – as in, YOU CAN’T RIGHT-CLICK AND THE FUNCTION KEY DOESN’T WORK doh (thanks Microsoft – the games these people play at our expense are endless). Getting the bootcamp drivers was a barrel of fun. To sum up, I tried 4-5 flavors of the bootcamp windows drivers, and all of them failed. The more recent ones gave a message that “this macbook is not compatible”. Thanks Apple, but no I am not buying a new laptop every two years. Finally I went back far enough (Bootcamp 4.0.4033<\/a>) and got a different message “this version of bootcamp requires Windows 7” from within Windows 8.1. So that failed too. BUT… when it finished failing, Windows 8.1 threw me a bone and asked if I wanted to try installing in “Compatibility Mode”. And like Luke threading the needle and destroying the Death Star… I got my drivers.<\/p>\n

In linux, Ubuntu went fairly smoothly, using REFind, which has come a long way since I last got mad at it and reverted to REFit during my last quad-boot post. Seems to find everything! Ubuntu 13.10 seemed to trash my Windows boot record though, now I have to go through the Ubuntu grub menu instead of directly booting from the REFind menu, until I figure out a fix. Also in the cons column, you STILL have to add this stupid hard-to-remember line to your kernel load line (after removing “–“) to get Ubuntu live (or initial installation) to boot, until you get the proprietary binary nvidia driver installed:<\/p>\n

nouveau.noaccel=1<\/code><\/pre>\n
Gentoo – ahh gentoo – copied over the files and kernel – and just keep on going. Wahoo. And then I updated both gentoo and ubuntu to direct boot from EFI following the typically excellent docs<\/a>. It. Blazes.<\/p>\n
UPDATE: wow that was horrible. Getting Windows moved to the ssd took a beta copy of WinClone, and that only worked after I moved all my partitions around to ensure that the Windows one was NUMBER FOUR EXACTLY. Ouch. And, in classic technology form, as soon as I got everything Just About Perfect… the cat jumped up on the laptop and caused me to spill a whole glass of water on it… and now the left Shift is sticking… Apple wants $1250 to fix… there’s a sweatshop in NYC that will do it for $200, if I ship them my laptop… lord have mercy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just updated my Macbook Pro, removing the Super Drive and adding an SSD, following this awesome, concise and precise video. It was as good a time as any to refresh everything. Here’s the result: And here is the partitioning to get it done: Here are my highlights (cautionary tales, really) from the experience. I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[129,144,127,104,141,136,201,126],"class_list":["post-1725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tricks-tips-tools","tag-dual-boot","tag-gentoo","tag-gpt","tag-hardware","tag-macbook-pro","tag-quad-boot","tag-refind","tag-ubuntu"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t