Tripleboot triple trouble - a short guide how (not) to setup OSX, Windows 8 and Ubuntu

Last time I wrote about my new hardware and disappointments I had with various systems that I tried to install while waiting for my storage hard drive to finally arrive. I think I started struggling to do my perfect setup on Wednesday. Unfortunately I had little time after work so I failed doing something and decided that I have to wait for weekend in order to do this right. These kind of things are so plain stupid, time consuming and worthless but they had to be done so weekend it is! I went to work on Friday earlier then usual in hope of coming back home earlier too. The plan was that I will have enough time to do it all in one strike and the fun begun. This is a short tutorial or a guide on how to make your own hackintosh/Windows 8/Ubuntu developer setup, assuming you have right hardware.


Note that this almost bulletproof scenario was the one that finally worked for me but I did so many other stupid things in the process that If I wanted to present a log of my actions here I would probably stop somewhere near tip number 100. Computers are fun! Yay...

Assumptions:

0) Your hardware is OS X compatible and you are capable of running it without too much problems. My rig is running perfectly fine including sound and WiFi support. And I pretty much don't care about other things but as far as I have checked sleep mode also worked (if this is something unusual - I don't know and I don't give a crap, never had time to play with this stuff before, and I am not planing to do so).

1) You have USB sticks that are bootable with OS X Mavericks installer and Multibeast on it (to make such a flash drive I obviously used Unibeast). Somewhere at the bottom I will try to gather all the useful links so hopefully I won't have to search for them again in the future, and you might benefit from that in the process ;)

2) You have USB Windows 8 installer that is _NOT_ UEFI installer. I did a horrible mistake and struggled for an hour browsing for solutions as I was almost certain that I need UEFI disk. MAC is using GPT for hard drive and only UEFI installation on Windows is capable of running on GPT disk... How stupid I was... precious time wasted! Don't make that mistake - explanation will be somewhere below why this was a mistake.

3) USB Ubuntu installer - nothing to add here really.

So let the short-list and my TODO list for the future begin:

1) Boot up OSX installer and go to Utilities -> Disk management.
Partition everything as you see fit, but note that OS X needs Journaled partition and your Windows partition (I assume you install both on one SSD) needs to be FAT - yes! FAT.

This way the disk will be created as GPT-MBR hybrid therefore you will be able to install non-UEFI windows from USB. Windows installer sees such partition as regular MBR as far as I have deduced from all the articles online.

This is pretty much the only way for Chimera bootloader to see both OS X and Windows.

2) Leave the installer after partitioning _without_ installing and go install Windows 8 first. - This might not be necessary but I had problems with different order. Of course in Windows installer you need to format the FAT disk made by Disk Utility as NTFS in order to install Windows but hey, this was necessary!

3) After installing go back and install OS X on the partition you created before.

4) Boot up from USB again and in bootloader select your OS X installation. This way it will boot, otherwise it won't.

5) Run multibeast to finalize your installation. I did select ethernet drivers, audio and some other stuff.

6) Restart and see that only Windows 8 boots up - happy times.

7) While already in Windows go to Computer Management and find what partition is OS X installed to.

8) Run cmd as admin and run command DISKPART. Select the disk and partition with OSX and Chimera installed and run active command. (e.g: select disk 0 enter select partition 3 enter active enter, quit)

9) Restart

10) See that now it doesn't boot Windows 8 anymore. In fact it doesn't boot anything due to some GPT Error 0 message.

11) Boot up again from USB stick to OS X installer, check what disk is your OS X on (Info in Disk Utility) mine was disk0s3 and remember that.

12) Unmount the OS X partition in Disk Utility and quit the tool.

13) Run terminal and type this dd if=/usr/standalone/i386/boot1h of=/dev/disk0s3 where disk0s3 should be what you need.

14) Restart and see that OS X finally boots up with chimera boot loader - first success.

15) Chimera defaults to OS X partition, looks ugly as hell (every theme for chimera, multibeast is bundled with is just plain ugly) and has timer for the default system with time out that takes long and stops booting from being smooth as it should.

16) Download any boot loader theme that looks not as bad as the default one and copy over files or just edit the god damn plist - if you don't care feel free to skip it but since I have new shiny PC and it can look nice then lets make it nice.

17) Go to OS X find /extra/ folder and edit plists for the higher resolution. There are two, one for boot loader and one for the apple boot screen. The key is Graphics Mode and string is in format Width x Height x Bpp without spaces (e.g. 1680x1050x32)

18) In plists enable default partition, hide unnecessary ones and select timeout to 0 (the hide partition and default keys did not work for my when using names or anything else - only hd(0,3) as an example. Check DiskInfo what you want to hide. I did hide all the data partitions.

19) Enable Qucick Boot or something like that in the plist - just google or look for links below.

20) Boot up (it will go straight to Windows 8) change the active partition back to Windows like I did a few steps back (why? more on that later)

21) Go to Windows Store and try to locate upgrade to Windows 8.1

22) Notice that there is no goddamn update, then google whats up.

23) Start downloading 800MB of Windows Updates in hope that it will make Windows 8.1 upgrade visible in Store as teh internetz say.

24) Download and install the update, restart dozen of times in the process and finally go into cmd diskpart again  and restore OS X partition as active - btw I did this part (I mean installing Windows 8 and Upgrade to 8.1) a couple of times - yeah each damn time I had to go through couple of screens and be polite saying that I don't want any of my data leak to microsoft and their partners just to do the same damn thing over and over with each upgrade to 8.1. But hey, they do remember your choice of  your wallpaper so you don't have to change it each time - FUCK YOU...

Now when you boot by pressing F8 when the little ASCII wheel is spinning should bring chimera where you can choose your OS, or if not by default Windows 8 will be booted as fast as possible - that is what I needed.

So just some final steps...

25) Carry on configuring Windows 8 - setup desktop as default after booting (it is possible since Windows 8.1 and it was the only reason I decided to finally give it a try)

26) Show administration tools in this metro thingy so that you have easy access to useful stuff from the start and make it somewhat usable (it is terrible at the beginning I know)

27) Remove unnecessary clutter from the start.

28) Install goddamn drivers, SVN, Mercurial and Visual Studio

29) Restart a couple of times.

30) See that Windows 8 stops shutting down - instead it hangs for a while and goes back to lock screen

31) Google and find nothing useful, scream out loud WHAT THE FUCK?!

32) Go to OS X and see that from this OS it works perfectly fine.

33) Check power management options and see that Windows is using something called fast boot

34) Override those settings and shut down this piece of shitty operating system.

35) See that it finally works as expected.

36) Go and complain about all this on your blog.

37) Carry on with your daily struggles - computers are just bad.

Now short explanations - why not UEFI - as it seems Chimera is not working with UEFI therfore you can't install Windows 8 from UEFI disk simple as that. The alternative is using UEFI bootloader such as clover but when I googled and saw all those happy tutorials it just appeared twice as complicated and I don't have two spare Saturdays during my weekend.

Also I did partition it first in OS X to get the GPT/MBR hybrid disk, also I assumed that installing OS X after Windows will not fuck up Chimera somehow - this might need more experimenting which I don't plan on conducting.

In step 20 I had to switch on Windows as active partition again - you might ask why? Well apparently Windows is stupid enough that it lets you download Windows 8.1 upgrade but it won't install and of course the error message is something really descriptive like 0xbaadbeef (ok It was totally different but you get the point). Microsoft claims that it is due to the corrupt installation or missing files in the update but it is just plain wrong - those lying little bastards! It is because Windows partition is no longer active - period. Just change that (no restart needed) and it will install - or go on with microsoft advice and redownload the 4GB Upgrade three times like I did...

Last thing - Secure Boot all this UEFI and stuff is just another microsoft joke going bad. Of course it is not about security but about control. Same goes for Symantecs stupid Reputation System and blocking all unsigned apps and demand paying them ransom for your apps well-being. For those who have never heard about it - google about WS.Reputation. Of course we do need to sign our applications so that our beloved users will trust us - like they seriously give a shit until some dork anti-virus says that is dangerous without any proof. Bad coincidence that the biggest certificate issuer which is Verisign belongs to Symantec.

Helpful links in a random order:
http://www.tonymacx86.com/25-boot0-error-official-guide.html

http://www.macbreaker.com/2012/01/how-to-install-bootloader-themes-for.html

http://www.tonymacx86.com/mountain-lion-desktop-support/69036-chimera-dual-boot-win7-ml.html

http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,5918.0.html

http://www.macbreaker.com/2012/01/how-to-hide-hard-disks-on-chimera.html

http://www.tonymacx86.com/wiki/index.php/Org.chameleon.Boot.plist

http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-help/69139-ebios-read-error-error-0x31-block-0x0-sectors-0-a.html - this one, I almost forgot - I had problems after installing visual studio when booting - with a glimpse of an eye I saw VS installer saying something about virtualization for Windows Phone Debugger I did check BIOS and I had Virtualization enabled. Don't know what are the concequences yet but I did disable it and the error message was gone.

Finally - you might ask - where is Ubuntu in all of this - it's in the trash with most of my brilliant ideas - but seriously I was so fed up with all this stuff and tired that I just installed my developer tools and stuff that I use, including steam and just played for a few moments like a child I used to be ;-) The plan was to partition my storage disk, install Ubuntu there and it should work with chimera I guess. The important part is that you want to install Linux last and it should be nice and dandy.