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I own a 2015 Macbook Air running Mojave. I plan to triple boot Mac, Windows 10, and Linux (specifically Manjaro EDIT: but Ubuntu's fine) by installing them (Windows and Linux) on an external SSD and booting from there. Preferably, I don't want to use rEFind or similar, as I don't want to make any (major) changes to my Mac.

The resources I found online are mostly incomplete or outdated. I would really appreciate it if anyone could provide a complete, comprehensive guide to do this in 2019, or at least provide of basic set of steps/links I could follow so the operating systems don't end up screwing each other over.

EDIT: I'll throw in a link to help: here

Basically, I mainly want to know about how to do this part:

Use more than one EFI partition. A drive can have more than one EFI partition. Additional EFI partitions do not have to reside at the beginning of the drive.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT 2: I think I've finally hit the jackpot here. It's perfect for what I want to do.

Basically, although it's a bit outdated, it covers all the boot file config stuff. It uses rEFInd, but installs it on the external drive so only a few are actually made to my internal SSD.

For anyone seeing this in 2022 or something, I'm happy if this helps!

Troll Z. Or
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1 Answers1

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To install Windows 10 and Linux on a empty external drive (with EFI):

With the bootable USB start your Linux distribution and start the Gparted software.

On the external drive (and make sure it's the right drive and not something else !) reformate the partition table to GPT

make a fat32 partition of 512MiB with the flag "esp"

make a Linux swap partition of the size of your RAM. (Usefull for hibernation. If you want a smaller partition make it at least 2GiB in case your RAM would be full.)

Make a ext4 partition wich leave the half of the disk empty for windows 10. This partition will be used to install Linux.

Before running the installer of Linux, install Windows 10 first to avoid boot problems.

Boot to windows 10 with a bootable USB.

When it ask for installation select "Custom: Install Windows only (advanced)"

You should see the empty part of the drive. Select it and click on "Next"

Windows 10 will be installed.

Reboot to Linux bootable USB

Then run the installer of your ditro. When it ask for installation, select the option named something like "custom partitions" or "something else". Make sure it use the fat32 esp partition for /boot/efi (GRUB 2 will be installed here), the Linux swap partition for the swap and the ext4 partition for / (Linux).

Linux will be installed.

Add a comment to this post if you have questions :)

Jeryosh
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