Restoring Chameleon Bootloader after Windows Vista Startup Repair

[shiggy822]

Hi guys,

 

I've only recently had to restore my Vista's startup by changing the active partition to my Windows partition then I put the Vista installation CD in to run the startup repair.

 

The MBR seems intact, right at the start of the boot up it still shows the 2 lines that were displayed when Chameleon was working.

 

Now I've tried making the HFS+ partition the active partition but it just seems to reboot.

 

When I boot off the Mac OS X Install CD and run diskutil list - the Mac partition actually shows up as a Windows NTFS while GParted and Windows recognise it as a HFS+ / HFSJ

 

I've searched and searched but I'm not able to get to the answer... any thoughts?

[logiconcepts819]

I had the same problem, until I determined Windows might have messed up the Master Boot Record. After doing some research on that matter, I came up with the following solution.

 

In Windows, open a command prompt and enter diskpart. At the DISKPART prompt, type: select disk 0. (I assume the main disk number is 0 on most PCs.) Then type: list partition. A list of all the partitions along with information for each partition should appear. Remember the partition number of your OS X installation (perhaps write it down somewhere; this number should range from 1 to 4). Then, exit diskpart and close the command prompt.

 

Next, you'll need to burn a copy of Knoppix from http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html. There are two flavors of Knoppix: the CD version and the DVD version. I used the latest DVD version in my case.

 

After burning the live disc for Knoppix, reboot, and make sure the live disc is still in your disc tray. At the Knoppix boot prompt, press enter, accept all the defaults, and the desktop should eventually display. Once the desktop has completely loaded, click the terminal icon in the taskbar. At the bash prompt, enter the following:

 

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=MBR.bin bs=512 count=1

sudo chown $USER:$USER MBR.bin

 

This will copy your MBR data into a file and fix the ownership permissions. Then, type

 

okteta MBR.bin

 

This should open up a hex editor, which will allow you to edit your MBR data. The partition types specified by the MBR are at offsets 1C2, 1D2, 1E2, and 1F2. This is the step in which you need to recall the partition number of your OS X installation. You'll want to go to offset 1C2 if the OS X partition number is 1, offset 1D2 if the OS X partition number is 2, offset 1E2 if the OS X partition number is 3, or offset 1F2 if the OS X partition number is 4. At this offset, replace the value 07 (Windows NTFS) with the value AF (Apple HFS). Then save the file and exit Okteta.

 

Back in the terminal, enter the following

 

sudo dd if=MBR.bin of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

rm MBR.bin

 

This copies the modified MBR data to your disk and removes the local MBR file. Finally, reboot your machine, making sure you remove the Knoppix live disc. Now, Chameleon should recognize the OS X partition as OS X rather than Windows.