rEFIt sometimes doesn’t work by itself. There is a script ( /efi/refit/enable-always.sh ) that should get it to start working. Also, the newest Mac Pros may not have been working with rEFIt at all until the newest version came out a few days ago.

Thanks for the quick response-sorry for the delay. I have had OSX, XP 32bit and Vista all running fine on separate drives in the past. The problems started when I formatted the Vista allocated drive and attempted to get Linux running. A simple install will boot off the Linux disk, but after restart, the black, no bootable drive screen comes up (when restarting without the disk). After that, Linux doesn’t show up in the Bootcamp window as Windows or otherwise. I have tried reinstalling Linux-grub seems to install, no problems shown, but still have this problem. reFIT installs with no menu and no obvious way to function. I am not sure how rEFIt or gptsync work or even what it means to sync the partition tables. Maybe that will shed some light. I will use your suggested links when I get a chance-I have very limited blocks of time at the moment-Thank you very much for your time and assistance.

rEFIt should work fine for you. Can you describe the issue you are having with it?

I would probably get OSX and Windows working first… especially since you are going to be using separate drives. This should be pretty easy to get working since Apple makes it so easy with Bootcamp. Following that, I would disconnect the drives that you do not what the Ubuntu installer to touch (everything but the hard drive you intend to install to) and install to that. You can then use rEFIt or the gptsync tool in Ubuntu to sync the partition tables after the install, it should boot up. After that, you can add the other drives back into the mix and debug any further problems (which I bet you will have because of the multi drive issue that tends to crop up for the Mac Pro users).

I and other users have written quite a bit of documentation for this at :
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MactelSupportTeam/CommunityHelpPages
and especially at:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MactelSupportTeam/AppleIntelInstallation

I know that it is bit a lacking for the Mac Pros (there are not a lot of Ubuntu users out there with them), but that ought to get you started. Also, you may benefit from some better help in the Apple Users forum at ubuntuforums.org

Thanks for you work and energy posting this, it is appreciated.

I am attempting to triple boot OSX 10.5.6, Windows XP32sp2, and Ubuntu 8.04.2

This seems a great method, though I am new to this and have only skimmed about 30 different threads and spent about 30 hours dealing with it. I do have a couple of questions. Please bear with me, I am not an IT guy-can only deal with simple command lines,etc. I just want to run a nice clean 64bit system for Maya and Nuke and am very anxious to avoid Vista.

My system is Mac 2X2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 10 GB ram. I am running Leopard on a drive in 1 bay and want to keep it that way. I want to run XP32sp2 for testing (Apple claims XP64 and 2000 are incompatible), and Linux Ubuntu in separate bays.

After many attempts unsuccessfully installing ubuntu and grub separately, etc, I have not achieved any bootable Ubuntu. Blinking black no bootable system. Difficult and time consuming to get back to OSX.

I also looked at rEfit. It doesn’t appear to work properly in Leopard, which I heard was a problem somewhere else.

I would prefer to keep Windows, OSX, and Linux on separate drives. I have 3 internals for this, but at certain points the installers leave unremovable partitions in various places, which seems bad because I guess these are left over from unsuccessful installs and I can’t get rid of them.

Thanks very much for reading this, if you have gotten this far. Is there hope for me? I would be very grateful.

Paul