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Dual-booting osx and vista64 on single GUID-partitioned drive


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Hi,

 

Here is my osx86 experience: I have single hard drive and I want to have MacOsX and Vista on it. I formatted the disk using GUID partition table with this scheme:

1: EFI partition (created automatically)

2: FAT32 (windows partition)

3: HFS+ (macosx partition)

4: FAT32 (misc data)

 

Then I installed Vista 64-bit (as it supports GUID partitions) onto 2nd partition and OsX (from retail dvd) to 3rd partition. In order to boot retail OsX I chose munkey's excellent guide which allows to use this 1st EFI partition (which is otherwise unused) to store the loader. But now I have a big problem: I can't use neither bootloader (vista's and osx's) to dual-boot both OSes. Vista's bootloader can't boot darwin bootloader from the 1st partition (even using boot0 file) and darwin bootloader don't recognize vista installation (as I know it isn't supposed to do it). Though I can boot both OSes using "f 1" or "f 2" in fdisk but that isn't solution.

 

Now I have to ruin my setup and install everything from the scratch because I really need to use both systems very frequently. So here I got some questions concerning MBR and GPT:

 

1. Is there still any way to dual-boot Vista and OsX on single GPT-partitioned drive? GPT is technologically superior and I'd like to stick with it...

 

2. As I understand the only advantage of GPT over MBR is ability to resize partitions without data loss. But PartitionMagic/Acronis programs can do this also.. So wha't the point?

 

3. rEFIt's "Myths and Facts" section mentions that if I choose "MBR" on partitioning (Disk Utility on retail DVD) I won't even be able to install OsX there. Is that true?

 

What is the best solution for my case? Any help appreciated.

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