Gilrock

Q: Triple boot is working - question about RefInd

Question at bottom...some history first...some of this may save you some trouble if you are attempting a triple boot setup:

I bought a new Mac Mini yesterday to be used as a machine to test software I develop that needs to run on Windows, Mac, and Linux so I needed to setup a triple boot.  I thought it would be much easier than it turned out.  I spent so many hours pouring over posts and tutorials and none of them worked.  I ended up piecing together advice from several posts to get it working.  I first was installing RefInd and then trying to repartition the hard drive.  That was the first roadblock because the instructions said to just drag the partition smaller and that wasn't an option because all you can do is split the partition and I don't believe it allowed changing the format type.  Several posts had scary long instructions that sounded like it would destroy the hard drive.  I finally found a post with a one line command that allowed me to revert the core storage and turn it back into a normal partition and then I was able to continue with the original instructions.  I create the extra Windows, Linux, and Linux Swap partitions but the next roadblock was when I tried to boot to the Win7 CD in a SuperDrive it would launch windows setup but the keyboard and mouse wouldn't work.  So I tried creating an ISO image from the CD and using BootCamp assistant and created a bootable USB drive with the driver support.  It just would not recognize the USB drive as a bootable device.  So I had to blow away all the extra partitions before it would allow me to use bootcamp to create a windows partition.  It took me 3 tries because I kept trying to shrink the Mac partition first to leave space for Linux but the bootcamp assistant will automatically add that free space back onto the Windows partition when it divides things up even though the numbers on the partition screen look like what you want it's not what you get if you tried to leave free space.  So I decided I would let it do it the way it wanted and then hope I could reduce the Mac partition after I got dual booting to Windows working.  So that all worked according to plan and in fact the exact same USB drive worked when letting the assistant do the reboot so not sure what they got going on there.  Got Windows configured and now RefInd was showing Mac and Windows at startup.  Then I booted back into Mac reduced the Mac Partition and added the Linux and Linux Swap partitions back in.  I erased the USB drive and created a bootable image using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.  That installation was tricky but got it done following some instructions I found that were close to what I ran into.

 

So now the triple boot setup appears to be working and my only confusion is what I'm seeing on the RefInd Boot screen.  After installing Ubuntu I now have 3 additional icons.  One is a round orange circle with a white circle inside that I believe is the Ubuntu Grub loader.  Then I have two Penquin icons which I believe are showing two different kernel versions.  I was expecting only one icon to show up when I installed Linux so I'm confused about why there are 3 icons and which one I should be using to boot into Linux.  Any RefInd experts out there that can advise?

 

Thanks,

Gil

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Feb 8, 2015 1:49 PM

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