Another Easy Way to Triple Boot – Using a Virtual Machine
Create a Triple Boot Windows 7, Mac OSX, Ubuntu System Using a Virtual Machine
Hey all. Since a lot of people have been coming to the site for the guide on how to install a Triple Boot Hackintosh I wanted to follow-up with another guide that offers an easy solution on how to have 3 OS’s installed on your PC without needing to reformat everything.
This guide will offer an easy alternative to having to format & reinstall your system which is nice because not everyone is sure they want to reinstall everything just to try out an OS they may not end up using.
To do this you will be setting up a “Virtual Machine” using free VM software from Oracle called “Virtual Box”.
Virtual Box is available for Windows, Linux or Mac OSX so this would work for each OS depending on what you are running.
Once you have downloaded Virtual Box, install the program on your system and you are ready to get started.
(I recommend going with all the default options as this will give you everything you need to easily get the most out of each VM install you add to your system.)
Installing Mac OSX, Ubuntu or Windows on a Virtual Machine
Using Virtual Box is pretty straight forward. I will outline the basic steps you need to perform to setup your own virtual machine for installing Max OSX, Windows or Ubuntu.
When you first launch Virtual Box you will be taken to a screen that says “Welcome to Virtual Box.” From here you can setup a new Virtual Machine for each OS you would like to install.
First you need to make sure you have the disk or ISO for whichever OS you would like to install. For simplicity sake I recommend burning your ISO so that you can work off a disk for your installation which requires one or two fewer steps.
So once you have your disk hit the “New” button in Virtual Box. A window will come up that says “Welcome to the New Virtual machine Wizard!”. Click “Next”.
On the next page you will be asked to fill in a “Name” for your installation. This name can be anything that makes sense to you as the user. For example “BackTrack Hack Install” or “Ghetto Windows Install”.
Once you choose a name you will want to select to “Operating System” and “Version” from the drop down menus. There’s a pretty decent selection but in the case of some Linux installations you can always select the OS and for the version type select “Other”. These selections influence the recommended system settings for the VM on the following pages.
Select the amount of system memory you would like to allocate to the VM. In most cases the default suggested by Virtual Box is fine. If you have 2-4gbs of memory in your system you should be fine. If you have less you may receive a warning on this page about your memory being limited.
On the next page you will create a Virtual Hard Disk. If you are using my guide to learn Virtual Box simply go with the default “Boot Hard Disk” option and “Create new hard disk”. The “Use existing hard disk” option is more important once you are familiar with Virtual Box if you are loading a hard disk image like the Chrome OS image that was floating around the net.
For the “Create New Virtual Disk Wizard” click “Next” and choose the “Dynamically expanding storage” option if you are test driving an OS. If you know you will be using the OS long term and have extra space on your hard drive you may want to choose the “Fixed-size storage” option and specify a size for your Virtual Disk.
Based on the OS and Version selections you made earlier Virtual Box will recommend a Virtual Disk size. The default it usually fine. Feel free to add on a few gigs for overhead. Click “Next”.
This will take you to the “Summary” page. Click “Finish” and you are done.
You should now see a new Virtual Machine in left hand side of Virtual Box. Highlight the new VM and click the green “Start” arrow at the top.
You will probably get a “First Run Wizard” window. This will allow you to select where your installation media is located. As I mentioned at the start, having your ISO burned to disk will simplify things here as you can just point the Wizard to your ROM drive.
Once you click “Finish” the Virtual Machine will attempt to boot off your install CD/DVD. The Virtual Machine you have created will basically act as a PC that is POSTing with no OS, so as long as your ISO is in your ROM drive and was burned properly you should now be taken into the installation.
For additional information on using Virtual Box, LifeHacker has a great article called: The Beginner’s Guide to Creating Virtual Machines with VirtualBox (although it’s an older version of Virtual Box, but all the settings are pretty much the same.)
LifeHacker also recently published another good guide entitled “How to Run Mac OS X in VirtualBox on Windows” for those who are looking for information on how to setup Mac OSX.
That’s all for now, check back for additional guides on installing and setting up Windows 7, Ubuntu, and Mac OSX within Virtual Box and common road blocks and fixes for each.
