On the 3rd of September I reported progress of using ICH10R SATA Controller in RAID mode, which would allow you to keep your Windows RAID active without having to change BIOS settings to boot to Snow Leopard. You might even be able to install Snow Leopard to a HARDWARE RAID volume…but I haven’t tested this yet.

But good news, this all works perfectly now. Here’s some details on how I did it with my setup:

Windows 7 installed on one hard disk (Windows 7 Boot Manager (BCD))

Ubuntu 9.04 installed on one hard disk (GRUB)

Snow Leopard 10.6.0 installed on one hard disk (Chameleon RC2 with PC_EFI 10.2, by me :) )

Essentially, you’ll need GRUB to multiboot the Chameleon boot file. This is how to get around the boot1: error reported by the official Darwin bootloader that’s included with Chameleon RC2. Installing GRUB to a USB drive probably won’t work, though I haven’t tested it…you may very well get USBEHCI Errors like I reported in my previous post about this.

So, basically…

  1. Install Ubuntu with GRUB to the MBR…on a completely separate drive
  2. Copy the Chameleon RC2 + PC_EFI 10.2 boot file to /boot/ on your Ubuntu partition
  3. Edit the menu.lst for GRUB to include a Snow Leopard entry
  4. Boot to your Ubuntu drive, then choose your Snow Leopard entry

What you should have in your menu.lst for the Snow Leopard is something like:

title Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6

rootnoverify (hd2,1)

kernel (hd0,0)/boot/chameleon_rc2_pc_efi10.2_boot biosdev=81

Where hd2,1 is the drive number and partition number of Snow Leopard (remember if you have a GPT partition table, partition 0 will be the EFI partition, so use partition 1)

hd0,0 will be the drive number and partition number of your Ubuntu Linux install

/boot/chameleon_rc2_pc_efi10.2_boot is the path to the boot file you put in /boot/ on your Ubuntu partition

biosdev=81 is passed to Chameleon to determine the correct volume to boot. Mess around with this value…it might be 80, 81, 82 or 83. If you don’t choose the right one Chameleon will not detect your com.apple.Boot.plist and not load your EFI strings.

And finally….to enable ICH10R RAID mode you should grab and install to your /Extra/Extensions folder AHCIPortInjector.kext and ATAPortInjector.kext. These two kexts are included in the Chameleon RC2/PC_EFI 10.2 package that I linked earlier (in the packages/Kexts folder).

Have fun with Snow Leopard and ICH10R ;)