OK, we’ve built a Sandy Bridge i5 2500k with GA-H61MS2H-Rev 1.3 PC, we’ve installed Lion 10.7.3 on a hard drive or USB hard drive fully functional, now we want to dual boot our existing Windows 7 and Lion 10.7.3 in the same hard drive. There are many ways of dual booting Windows 7 and Mac OS X, 2 popular ways:
1. Install Windows 7 on MBR partition 1 as Windows required, install Mac OS X on the second partition (use Windows 7 to shrink a small partition for Mac OS X), install Chameleon and the dual boot will be using Chameleon boot loader. This way is hard to install Ubuntu and triple boot: Windows 7, Mac OS X (LION) and Ubuntu.
2. The best way I use is to restore a working Mac OS X to the 2nd partition on the Windows MBR system, then use the Easy BCD to configure the dual booting, triple booting OS: Windows 7, Mac OS X and Ubuntu.
I’m going to show the #2 way, which I have Windows 7 installed on a hard drive, with EasyBCD configure for dual booting Windows and Mac OS X (Lion 10.7.3).
A. Use Windows 7 to shrink 1 or 2 partitions for Lion and Ubuntu (option).
Create a partition inside the hard drive by Shrinking it in Windows 7
B. Install Easy BCD first and create boot menu with Windows 7 and Mac OS X before doing the restoration of Lion partition. Create a Windows 7 boot disk to fix the MBR boot problem if needed. Normally, if we restore the Lion partition without installing multibeast, we don’t have to fix the boot loader. So, DO NOT install multibeast after restoration.
C. Lion 10.7.3 OS won’t let you to restore itself to another partition, use the USB Snow Leopard 10.6.3 we created to make Unibeast Lion Installer to restore the Lion 10.7.3 partition.
Select the Lion 10.7.3 partition source to restore to this newly formatted partition, drag the source and destination to the correct ones. Our h61mlion is the source and lion1073 is destination, click restore button, drag “h61mlion” to source and “lion1073” to destination, check again before execute.
When the restoration finished, we can just boot from the hard drive with Windows 7 MBR and the Easy BCD boot menu will appear. In case we need to fix the boot menu, put the Windows 7 boot cd (created earlier) and boot from it, it should fix the boot menu for us, if not, we can use diskpart to set Windows partition “active”
Now we should have a dual boot hard drive with Windows 7 and Lion 10.7.3, enjoy, next triple boot with Ubuntu.
If you have any questions for comments, please post, and thanks for reading.
Cheers,
idog
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