Hi, I'm trying to set-up a triple boot system on a Intel Mac. AFAIK, I can only have 4 primary partitions, 2 used by OSX (EFI and Mac HD), one more for Windows, and that leaves one for Ubuntu. I was wondering, if I set up the ubuntu partitioin as an LVM, would I be able to have multiple partitions in there (bypassing the GUID partition maps 4 partition limit)?
You can create a Linux Extended Partition and create multiple logical volumes within that partition. You won't need to use LVM if you do it that way. Just allocate as many logical volumes as needed to support the various distros you wish to run.
I can only have 4 primary partitions, and no extended partitions (GUID doesn't do extended partitions)
Is GUID something to do with LVM? I am not running LVM, so I am not familiar with the terminology. If it's another name for the standard partition table, you would have to remove one of the four primary partitions and replace it with an extended one instead. The extended partition can contain numerous logical volumes. I don't know if this will be of any help, but there is a shareware product called BootIt™ Next Generation which allows you to play with the partition table and exceed the four primary partition limit. It allows any single operating system to select which four partitions get loaded when it boots. A single operating system can only use one to four, but each OS can use a different set of primary partitions at boot time. If you wish to read further, this is their website. http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/index.htm
GUID is a system used by intel macs in conjunction with EFI. You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table. To allow you to boot legacy systems which don't support EFI (like Windows XP), Apple allowed you to have a hybrid GUID and MBR partition table. GUID can have up to 128 primary partitions, but no extended. MBR can have up to 4 primary partitions, and allows for extended partitions. The hybird table only allows four primary aprtitions, and no extended partitions. So I was wondering if an LVM is seen by other OS's as a single primary partition? And if so, would i then need a seperate /boot partition?
