There are lots of great guides out there for installing Snow Leopard on a PC. However, most of them (that involve dual booting) have the user installing Snow Leopard first, and then Windows 7.

I already have a Windows 7 install, and have spent a good while configuring it so I would rather not have to reinstall it if possible. I already have a separate partition set aside for Snow Leopard as I always planned to hackintosh it eventually. Is there a way I can just install Snow Leopard onto that partition and dual boot between Snow Leopard and Win7 without having to reinstall on my Win7 partition?

Hardware is an A-bit IP35 Pro motherboard and nVidia GeForce 8800gt graphics card.

Perfectly doable. When it comes to installing Chameleon, skip the step where you're meant to overwrite the MBR bootloader, and go straight to boot1h before copying the "boot" file.

Even if you do accidentally do this, all you need to do to get your windows back is to go into recovery mode of your windows CD, or otherwise restore the windows boot sector.

Once you're done and back in windows, play around with BCDEdit if the option to boot from your new OSX partition doesn't show up automagically.

Originally Posted by FreeBaGeL

Is there a way I can just install Snow Leopard onto that partition and dual boot between Snow Leopard and Win7 without having to reinstall on my Win7 partition?

Use Chameleon v2 RC5 pre8 by Dr.Hurt. It doesn't break the mbr of Windows 7. I upped a copy you can grab it HERE .

Hmmm, I've run into the following problem.

I have my windows install, and while doing that I made a separate partition for OS X.

I started installing snow leopard, but it told me it could not install to that partition (something about GUID partition) and told me I had to go into disk utility and re-format it as that. Problem is, it won't let me just reformat that partition in that manner, it wants me to do it to the whole drive, which of course would wipe my win7 install.

what type of format did you choose when you created the MacOS partition?


Click on Utilities on the tool bar, then select Disk Utilities.
On the left you should see your hard drive.
If not, a disk is not connected or cannot be read by your computer.
After selecting your hard drive click on Partition.
Under Volume Scheme, click current and select 1 partition.
Under Volume Information, name your hard drive.
Format: Free Space
Click Apply
Click Partition
After selecting your hard drive click on Partition.
Under Volume Scheme, click current and select 1 partition.
Under Volume Information, name your hard drive.
Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
At the bottom of the window Click on the Options Button.
Select the GUID Partition Table
Click OK
Click Apply
Click Partition
Quit Disk Utilities

Originally Posted by Bono2010

what type of format did you choose when you created the MacOS partition?


Click on Utilities on the tool bar, then select Disk Utilities.
On the left you should see your hard drive.
If not, a disk is not connected or cannot be read by your computer.
After selecting your hard drive click on Partition.
Under Volume Scheme, click current and select 1 partition.
Under Volume Information, name your hard drive.
Format: Free Space
Click Apply
Click Partition
After selecting your hard drive click on Partition.
Under Volume Scheme, click current and select 1 partition.
Under Volume Information, name your hard drive.
Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
At the bottom of the window Click on the Options Button.
Select the GUID Partition Table
Click OK
Click Apply
Click Partition
Quit Disk Utilities

Right, the problem is that will reformat my entire hard drive, and I have Windows 7 on one of the other partitions.

I guess there's no way around this, I have to reformat the entire drive, I can't just change the GUID partition table for that one partition and not destroy my Windows install?

Vanilla snow leopard will NOT allow you to install to an MBR partition - it is an arbitrary limitation of the installer, NOT the operating system!

Do you have access to an actual mac, or do one of your friends have an already working hackintosh? If yes, google for mbr osxinstall.mpkg and modify your install source yourself.

If not, you need to download a distro which has been modded to allow you to install to an MBR partition, like snowosx.

GUID is a newer partition scheme - to switch to that, you will lose all existing partitions. So, not advisable. I've been using MBR with no problems.