Installing Mac OS X 10.4.7 on Intel x86 machine & triple booting.

Here, in this tutorial I am going to discuss how to install Mac OS X 10.4.7 on your Intel x86 machine & how to triple boot it. For this tutorial, I am using following:

1. HP Pavillion DV 6114TX (1.6 GHZ Centrino Duo, 1.5 GB RAM, NVidia GO 7400)
2. Prepatched Mac-OS-X-10.4.7-AMD.Intel-(JaS)-ISO-Repack image. Dig through some torrents sites, and you will surely find it somewhere.
3. Other OSes, WinXP Professional and Ubuntu 6.10.

DISCLAIMER:
I am not endorsing the breaking of copyright laws and I write this solely for the purpose of education. I also do not take responsibility to what may happen to your computer.

Let us start the journey.

• Get prepatched Mac OS X on DVD.

• Boot in your Windows XP partition.

• Make sure you have atleast 6 GB of unallocated space on your hard disk. If you do not have this much space available, do not panic. Get trial version of Partition Magic.

• Start Partition Magic
• Resize your partition.
• Drag the slider to make any of your current partition smaller and to leave atleast 6 GB of unallocated space.
• 'Apply' your changes. It may ask you to reboot your machine.

• Go to 'Start->Run' and type in 'compmgmt.msc'. This should open 'Computer Management' on your XP machine.

• Click on 'Disk Management' from the left pane.
• Select unallocated space & create new primary partition. Format it with FAT32. It does not matter how you format it. I used FAT32. Give a name to your partition and do remeber it properly as it is going to be required later on during installation.
  
• Wait for format to complete.

• Insert the Mac OS X install disk in your DVD drive & reboot your computer.

• Make sure that in your BIOS your first boot device is set as CD-ROM. If not, do it to boot from Mac OS X installation DVD.
  

• Press enter when it says to "Press any key". Specify "-v" as boot option. This will help you read through all the boot messages.
  

• It will take couple of minutes before you see a very neat Mac OS default blue screen.

• Wait for the menu bar to come up. It will come on top of your screen.

• Select your language.

• Press 'Continue' and agree to the license agreement. There should only be "enjoy" on the prepatched installation DVDs. Press 'Agree'.
  

• When you reach to a place where you need to select hard disk but nothing is listed, open "Tools->Disk Utility" from menu available on top of your screen. Select the FAT32 partition you created earlier. Do you remembered the name, didn't you? Select "Erase" from options available on right pane of the dialog. Erase it with "HFS+ Journaled" partition. When you are done with this partitioning close the disk utility. Now, you should see your drive in the setup page. Select the only disk available there and press "Continue".

• On next page, select custom installation and select appropriate patches. SSE3 if you have the support or SSE2. ATI, Soundblaster etc. Whatever applies to your machine configuration. If you want to save disk space, remove unnecessary printer drivers from the installation list. Also remove unnecessary language options. Important: De-select wireless driver from custom patch list. Else your Mac will hang on the next boot with an error "no airport driver found".

• Press 'Install'. And wait for OS installation to complete.

• Finally the installation will optimize the your partition and 'Reboot'.

• Remove the Mac OS X installation DVD from your drive.

• Upon reboot, your GRUB will load. Choose to start Ubuntu.

• Open '/boot/grub/menu.lst' in gedit or vi.

• Add an entry for Mac OS X at the end fo the file as shown below:

              
         title           Mac OS 10.4.7
         root            (hd0,1)
         makeactive
         chainloader     +1

TIPS: How to decide the proper root. It is very simple. The first partition on the hardrive is '/dev/hda1'. And GRUB understand it as (hd0, 0) - Harddisk 0, partition 0. In my case it is Windows partition. The second partition is '/dev/hda2' (hd0,1). I have my Mac on this partition. And therefore I have used (hd0, 1) as root in the above mentioned entry.

• Save the "/boot/grub/menu.lst" file. And reboot.

• Upon reboot you should see an entry with the 'title' you set for your Mac OS X entry in your grub. Choose it to start your Mac OS X.

• If you want to use Mac OS X's boot loader, what you need to do is to just make Mac OS X partition to be active. It can be done using tools like GParted, spfdisk.

• To enable NVidia support on Mac OS, get the latest driver from http://macvidia.starchaser.org/
  

So that's it. We have 3 different OSes of or choice running on our machine. Mission accomplished. :-)