Being able to boot Linux AND Windows physical installs with Parallels

SOLVED: Being able to boot Linux AND Windows physical installs with Parallels

Hi All,

Having gone through a pretty steep (to say the least) learning curve in what to do and what not to do when partitioning and playing with GPT and MBR, I now have a triple booting system using rEFIt and I even have my Windows install booting in Parallels (using Boot Camp;disk0s4 method).

The problem I have now is getting my Linux installation to play nicely with the setup. If I produce a virtual machine using disk0s3 as the only disk, I get a message about there being no operating system on the virtual machine. And I even figured out why.

In MBR partition schemes, you can only have one active partition. In this case the active partition is the 4th one for Windows. If I try changing this to the 3rd partition for my Linux install, then I do get a grub error screen - which I am pretty sure I could get going eventually - but in this set up my Windows install wont boot.

Although Parallels does a good job of hiding other partitions from the guest OS, it is not quite enough to get me to the point where I can have both physical installs running in Parallels at the same time.

Does anyone have any ideas on how this can be worked around?

Cheers,

Milamber

 

Looks like my post is getting buried under the pile of 3.0 posts.... *bump*

Any ideas anyone?

 

No worries people - I have got it working now.

See my explanation here:

http://forums.parallels.com/showthread.php?p=64392#post64392