How to Triple Boot OSX/Windows/Ubuntu on your Macbook in 20 minutes 1080P

Works on all apple computers with the OSX 10.8 and greater. I will be using OSX Mavericks, Windows 8, and Ubuntu 14.04. You will not lose any data on your Mac and you can revert your changes at any time with disk utility. We will be using rEFInd, and won't even touch the bootcamp assistant.

Windows 7 will not work with the Macbook Pro Retina but may on other models, this is due to USB 3 incompatibility and the lack of an actual driver for it on the install DVD. I used Windows 8 from MSNDAA.

You can 'burn' your images onto a bootable usb drive, or, like me, just burn them to blank DVDs and use your superdrive.

Download the newest version and the one that says refined-bin-0.X.X.zip

That should be good enough for now, when the video is processed I'll watch it and add a more in depth description.

[tonyrose]

This is still the best tutorial on this topic (see my earlier comment). I have used it several times successfully. 
However, a big problem with using a Hybrid MBR is that every time I upgrade OSX, I lose the other OS's, requiring lots of work to recover & reinstall. So, looking to avoid that...I have heard you can start with OSX + a pre-existing Bootcamp Win10 partition, install ReFIND on the OSX in recovery mode (or by turning off SIP), then proceed by resizing the BootCamp partition and installing Ubuntu without Grub on that partition with ubiquity -b. It seems that approach might avoid a hybrid MBR, but I am not sure, since I haven't actually done it (yet). If that fails, I will use TimeMachine to recover, and regroup (to using your method)...

Do you know if the above modified approach works?

[leonardobohac]

Thanks a lot man! I tried to triple boot several times before watching this video, but none of the guides I followed helped me as this one

[thaparg]

Thank you so much for this great tutorial! I installed windows 8.1 instead of windows 8. So I am facing a little issue i.e. every time I boot I need to click a button to get into refind boot screen otherwise macbook stays at white screen. Can this be solved by installing refind again using OSX? Another question is about installing updates for each OS. Can the updates for each OS be installed from inside those partitions or I will have to manually install the updates? Thanks again!

[tonyrose]

Very nice video. I keep coming back, since OS X updates tend to delete the hybrid MBR; tricky. I had originally planned a quad boot with both Ubuntu and CentOS (+ Windows 8.1 and the base for my MacBook Pro, OS X, of course). Same procedure, but the CentOS media was unclear enough to make me pause...have you installed that flavor?

[nerollo]

I get this cl.ly/image/2Z2O1v3u2F3r at 20:00 - "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed on GPT disks." (MBA mid 2011)

[rodddogg]

Thank you so much for this video!! I just have one question: Do you have any sort of hibernation/sleep issues conflicting with rEFInd and Mac OS X?

[frankhanhart]

You did put some work in this tutorial, many thanks for this ! I failed initially 2 times to get Ubuntu properly installed (it hung during shutdown after install) and therefore didnt appear in the REFInd menu, but for some reason 3rd time worked. Windows 10 Technical Preview 10130 also got succesfully installed. All on my MacBook Pro Mid 2012. Great HOWTO !

[grigorisvelegkas]

very nice presentation! i consider buying a macbook pro, but i'm more of a debian guy, so before i buy anything i'd like to make sure that debian can run smoothly on my hardware. After a little research i found out that many debian(and generally linux) users were complaining about kernel's compatibility with the hardware, but the posts were a little outdated. Did you have any similar issues? Also performance-wise is your system booting up slower with rEFInd than with the normal bootloader? And last but not least are there any over-heating issues when you are on Ubuntu? (I know that Ubuntu is Debian-based so i think they will pretty much act the same in the aforementioned.).
Thanks in advance!

[mirdaki]

Thanks for the video! I was wondering though, if I have windows installed with bootcamp already can I then use the rEFInd to install Ubuntu and load up windows like you did here?

[PebblesandBilly]

This has been immensely helpful.  I get all the way to the part of the windows 8 installation where we delete the partition that will be used for windows 8, create a new partition in the same location, and format the new partition.  I get an error message that says "Windows cannot be installed to this disk.  This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu."  I'm not able to progress to the next screen of windows installation.  Any suggestions?  (I am using a macbook pro 15" retina display.)  Thanks a bunch in advance!

[KJew]

Hey great video. I installed everything, but windows 8 is up and I can't use keyboard or mouse to set up personalization or get to the point where I can install drivers. What do I do? The mouse was working through the install process but now nothing.

[JohnnyDaPirate]

Installing windows broke rEFInd for some reason, and I have no clue how to fix it.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled rEFInd several times. I've followed your instructions precisely; everything worked perfectly until the installation of Windows.

I was able to complete my installation of Windows, and can launch both OS X and Windows 8 by pressing option/alt on startup.

I used the latest versions of OS X, Ubuntu, and rEFInd, along with Windows 8.1 Professional.

Uninstalling rEFInd returns my computer to it's default boot method -- automatically booting OS X. But as long as rEFInd is installed, It goes to a black screen.

I wouldn't even mind this so much if I had a way to boot Ubuntu without rEFInd.

So, any idea what the issue is? All help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Johnny

[muharraqi]

first thanks alot, and everything is working great on my macbook.

Q:but i have a question i can't see windows partition when i boot on osx, because same time i need to add file to windows partition ( in boot camp i can do this easily ) but here i cant ?

[JohnnyDaPirate]

I did this about 6 months ago and it was working great! However, I recently wanted to wipe out my OS X partition, so I did, and reinstalled OS X. After reinstalling rEFInd, everything but my Windows partition is working fine like it was. I get an error when trying to boot up Windows. Ubuntu + Mac partitions still work fine. Any ideas?

Error: No boot disk found

P.S. I do have a time machine backup of my OS X partition before wiping and reinstalling.

Thanks,
Johnny

[MrStinktown]

Thanks so much for the guide ellswortha101, it has been incredibly helpful and saved me hours of time! I am stuck on one last step (similar to PebblesandBilly, but with a slightly different error message). During the Windows 8 install, I receive an error message saying that "Windows cannot be installed on this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only installed on GPT disks." I'm guessing that I fudged something during the gdisk step, but I can't seem to troubleshoot it for the life of me. Do you have any tips?

[thomasvanderhoydonck]

I would like to triple boot OSX Yosemite, Windows 8.1 and Kali Linux. Is there any difference with this method? I spend the last 2 days figuring out how to do this. Could you help me please ??

[liotay]

what's that swap space for? is it for when you want to resize partitions and you can use that space as to swap and resize make it bigger or smaller partitions? not sure 

[nicholasheytens]

what is the first command to see the refind config file? Cant quite make it out.

[DavidFletcher]

couple questions did you delete your mac recovery partition?

and is there something special that you did to get ubuntu to show up in refind as I can't see it at all...

[maximilianocontreras]

One more: Have you tried with USB sticks instead of SD?