Successful setup of OS X Lion + Data Partition + Bootcamp Win7 Ult

Yes, I have got the same problem that Windows 7 destroyed the OS X partitions. After installing on 4 Macs I found the clue why Windows destroyed the OS X partitions: You cannot have a disk with more than 4 partitions in Windows 7 because it is booted via the MBR partition table. And I had five partitions:

200 MB EFI Partition

600 MB Recovery Partition

120 GB OS X Partition

120 GB Windows 7 Partition

250 GB Data Partition

I have solved this by deleting the 600 MB Recovery just before I started installing Windows 7. The 600 MB Recovery partition is not needed.

Good work :)

That's the reason why I'm waiting for iPartition to be compatible with Lion before I upgrade.

Hi again 😉

well now its working:

i followed all the steps from ernopena_nyc but with 2 more steps 😉

• Install OS X Lion on a single partition hard drive.
• Delete Recovery Disc from Lion OSX over the terminal, Boot DVD or whatever u wanna use (Partition is around 600 Mb)
• Run Bootcamp Assistant.
• Made a 100GB Bootcamp partition for Windows.
• When prompted for install disc, STOP installation and quit Bootcamp.
• Launch Disk Utility. Look at the 2 partitions.
• Shrink Mac OS X partition to 100GB.
• Click on + to create a 3rd partition in free space.
• Quit Disk Utility.
• Insert Windows 7 installer DVD and restart Mac.
• After the startup chime, hold down OPTION key.
• Wait a while until the Windows 7 DVD appears and select it.
• Mac should start up from DVD. Start installing Windows 7.
• Format the Bootcamp Partition with NTFS Fileformat (when prompted where to install Windows 7, otherwise u can't select the Drive).
• Continue until finished.
• Load Bootcamp drivers with Mac OSX Snow Leopard DVD (Bootcamp is not on the burned Lion DVD) or download them and burn them to DVD.
• When finished, restart and log into Windows 7.
• Continue installing your applications. Do activations.
• When finished, restart, holding down the OPTION key.
• You are done. You should now see your OS X Lion and Win 7 partitions.

Now it should work. I dont know if you can divide the 3rd partition that u make in as many part as you want, but for me it's working now with this structure:

100 Gb Main OS X Lion Partition

600 Gb OS X Documents Drive

100 Gb Bootcamp Partition (Windows 7) (for Games a.s.o.)

Thx for your help ernopena_nyc and MarkN123

Thanks, both of you, for this. I'm in the middle of two macs, upgrades and bootcamp higher than alligators in the Okefenokee... and I don't have time for all this at all. I don't have near the hard drive you guys do, so only two partitions - Lion and Windows7Ult w/ MS Office. Not a guru. I was reviewing forums on bootcamp, trying to catch up. Genius Bar did it for me the first time - 6hours and painfully watched him literally hit my new keyboard like it was a rock. Figured if I was going to suffer 6 hours it was going to be with a glass of wine keeping me company, not some hairy gorilla.

Oh, wait, Lion says "success!"

Curiosity question, after all that chatter: do you use the third partition for all the data from both sides as a 'shared' location? does that work?

I have also added VM Fusion so I don't have to reboot all the time, that annoys me. VMF worked pretty well in the Leopard OSX, but does Lion have the ability to do that so I don't have to add VMF? I switch back and forth frequently.

Thank you very much for the instructions and list. I'll post a "Survived" by 02:00 ...

Cynthia

This is a copy of a post I left on the thread that parallells this one

(https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3209755?answerId=16036907022#16036907022)

Thank you for this thread. As a long time Windows user, I am playing with my first mac since 1992, and am dealing with the exact same issue. In addition, I messed up when reinstalling Lion on a clean drive, by creating MBR partitions with Disk utility (I thought I was going to save time later...).

So, just to confirm before I go through the entire process again, Is there any way to create 4 partitions if we delete the recovery disk partition:

OSX, OSX data, W7, W7 Data?

It seems another alternative would be to swap the Super Drive with a second hard drive. Then we would have:

Disk 1: Recovery Disk, OSX, OS data

Disk 2: W7, W7 data.

Thanks in advance.

Some updates in November 2011 regarding the above:

First of all, thanks to ernopena_nyc and NESTi's instructions, the above procedure ended up working, but not without a couple of tweaks/precisions:

1) Removing the "Recovery HD" partition as suggested by NESTi, it is indeed a critical step -- unless you were able to install Snow Leopard/Lion without creating one. As noted in the thread, I also witnessed my W7 deleting the OSX boot-up partition, and I was completely unable to boot up back to Mac. I had to a disk reformating and clean reinstall 😟. The "Recovery HD" partition is hidden and not visible under Disk Utility. Terminal deletion is therefore the only option as suggested by NESTi. For those unfamiliar with Terminal, and the proper language and syntax (that was my case), the following link was a life saver: http://osxdaily.com/2011/06/30/deleting-the-mac-os-x-10-7-lion-recovery-hd-parti tion/. I hope this helps.

2) under the latest version of BootCamp (November 26th 20110), it is not really possible to quit Bootcamp after the creation of the Windows partition and the "insert Windows installation disc" prompt: Bootcamp will not even start the partitioning process unless the Windows installation disc is in the drive. Once Bootcamp starts the Windows installation process, it is essentially quasi-impossible to remove the disc and restart under Mac until Windows is actually installed. At that point it is too late to mess with partitions. SOLUTION: There seems to be a short window of opportunity (no pun intended) to remove the Windows installation disc during the actual partitioning and creation of the Bootcamp partition. The procedure that worked for me happened as follows:

• launch Bootcamp utility
• save drivers as required
• chose size of Bootcamp partition
• click "continue"; at that point, Bootcamp Admin WILL NOT do anything until the Windows installation disc is inserted in the drive
• insert Windows installation DVD
• click on install
• WHILE BOOTCAMP IS PARTITIONING: hit the eject key and/or press the force-eject button on the side of the drive. Hopefully, the disk will eject before the partitioning is completed.
• Upon completion of the partionioning, Bootcamp Admin should be requesting the Windows installation disc again
• Quit Bootcamp Admin.
• Refer to above procedure to create the OS X data partition between the OS one and the Bootcamp one.
• In my case, I had to press "C" at restart to boot with the Windows installation DVD.
• Install Windows normally on the Bootcamp partition.

In response to my question above, it seems impossible to have the following partitions: OS X, OS Data, W7, W7 Data. That is because the OS X also uses a very small Boot parition (in addition to Recovery HD), and therefore my ideal scenario would really be 5 partitions on the disk, which W7 cannot handle on a single physical drive without killing the MacBoot.

I hope to be able to try multiple Mac and Windows partitions in the future using two separate hard drives, one for Mac and one for Windows.

I hope this helps.

Way to go bro, thank u soo much. With this share you saved me a lot of time. As i have already formatted my mbp twice to make a third data partition. And now i was just going for the third one. U save me bro.

Thank u soo much.

But i haven't tried it yet. And will comment for sure, when the whole process is complete.

Thanks once again.

Hey NESTi, can u help me regarding deleting the 600mb recovery partition. As i checked this link it says there is full on possiblity that you can face DATA LOSS.

So please can u tell me any safer way to config 3partitions in my new MBP.

i.e.

1st partition for ESI

2nd partition for MAC.OS.X.Lion

3rd partition for putting Data files (Is there any way to access it properly from i.e copy and paste data from Lion and Win7 both)

& 4th partition for Win7

Please help...

I would leave any 350MB alone which I have for Windows 8.

And isn't having data partitons AFTER the OS the method that works best? the trick is in doing the setup all ahead of installing anything, not afterwards.

Hi

Sorry for the delayed answer.

I had the same message when i deleted the recovery partition. With DATA LOSS they mean the recovery informations on that partition.

I didn't suffer from any data loss after deleting that partition.

Even with my new Laptop i've done the same process again and without any loss i created the new partition table.

@The hatter

yes its always best to do everything upfront, but there shouldn't be any problems with doing it afterwards.

Thanks to all steps here and some from external sources i have compliled a tutorial to do this:

http://www.techparaiso.com/90-steven-paul-jobs-apple-inc/apple-mac-osx/apple-mac -devices/100-best-way-to-setup-osx-mountain-lion-windows-8-data-partition-on-mac book-air-pro-tutorial

Do you really have to delete Recovery partition from OSX in order to make multiple partition with osx + data + windows to work?

When using diskutil in the terminal, to erase the recovery partition, you don't have to use the terminal for anything past the second step . Some (most?) people have their main partion named "Macintosh HD" instead of "Lion" (as referenced in the link) which is the default, and have no idea how to account for the space between "Macintosh" and "HD", or would just prefer to spend as little time as possible in the terminal.

In that case, after using " diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ Blank /dev/disk0s[whatever] " you can simply open Disk Utility, and erase the Recovery partition from there, although, it may not be named "Recovery" in disk util. You should be able to easily identify it by the fact that it's a new and small partition in disk utility.

For pedagogical purposes, if your main partition is in fact named "Macintosh HD", you would simply add a backslash before the space so that terminal knows it's a continuation from the first word and end up with something to the effect of " diskutil mergePartitions HFS+ Macintosh\ HD disk0s3 disk0s4 "