Hard drive partitioning help

[mustgroove]

I tried installing 10.4.5 a while back, but got thwarted by setting up the hard disk properly... my setup is a Dell Inspiron 9400, with a 100 Gb hard drive... at the moment, my hard drive is set up thusly: 3 Primary partitions, C: and D: are 2 WinXP installations, E: is storage space for both XP installations...

 

Back then, I tried to create a new 20 Gb Primary partition at the very end of the drive for OSX... not knowing what file system to format it with, I chose NTFS in the hope that that would work out...

 

The OSX installer detected the partition perfectly well, and detected that it was an NTFS partition, however it would refuse to format the partition to HFS...

 

Sooooo, basically, given my situation, what is the best method for me to successfully create a 20Gb OSX partition at the end of my hard drive so I can triple boot with my existing 2 XP partitions? Any help would be very greatly appreciated!!!

[dilnalomo]

ah-ha! so i am not the only one....

 

did you get some error like "could not write partition table"?

i got this little error many time, no matter where my partition is , osx just won't erase it...

i dont think the location of the partition matters, but i believe fat32 works better than ntfs.

 

now i have, C: = windows, D: = OSX and E: = data

[mustgroove]

yeh that's the error i got...

 

im getting the JaS 10.4.6 dvd now, will try again with that & the diskpart method listed on the wiki...

[AllanVS]

Delete the partition, and leave it "empty". OSX will find the "RAW" partition and you can install on that. That is how I did it with 10.4.2 back in the dayl.

[fOZf8]

you need to Shag your partition too, to 0xAF, and make it a Primary partition. At least I had to, OSX can't (or won't) mount the partition otherwise...unless there are no other partitions on the hdd, easy as pie then.

 

So far in my experience as well, I haven't been able to install any build at the end of a hdd unless it's quite small. I've been trying to on an 80gb all evening, split in half so OSX has 36gb on the second half. It installs fine through VMWare, but thats as far as I can get it, won't boot in any manner I've found.

[mustgroove]

Shag my partition? hehe

 

So would I be correct in saying this is what I need to do:

 

1. Create primary partition in whatever software

2. Do the technical FAQ method:

 

list disk (should show at least 1 drive listed)

select disk 1 (change this number to correspond to the drive listing number for the hard disk you're going to install OS X upon)

list part (You may or may not have partitions established on the disk you selected)

The next two steps are only needed if you are going to remove an existing partition for OS X use:

select part 2 (whatever partition in the list you intend for OS X)

delete partition

In either case, continue below:

create part primary id=AF (the drive selected now has free space for an OS X partition)

exit

 

???

 

Step 2 is the shagging method you mentioned fOZf8?

[mustgroove]

OK i've got 10.4.5 installed now, Shagging the disk worked fine & its installed, but when the computer rebooted, Acronis OS selector couldn't detect OSX, and I can't seem to get it to dectect it now either...

 

Any pointers?

[dilnalomo]

lol, shagging your partition...lol.

 

try this: first make your patition an extended fat32, install osx, and afterward use acronis director suite to make it a primary, then os selecotr will work like a charm.