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dual boot from darwin


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I have been scouring the forum looking for solutions to multi boot os. I started this quest after having a bout with Acronis OS selector. I have an active XP installation on a SATA drive which normally boots first as set in the bios. I have a really good functioning copy of iDeneb 10.56 on a seperate PATA hard drive. I used Acronis OS selector to switch between OS X 86 and XP. At random times. I would find the mbr munged up on the SATA drive. I could go between iDeneb and XP and shut down without problems and then I would encounter the inability to boot,i.e., no bootable media, insert disk, etc. Some research on this seems to indicate, as near as I can tell, that when using Acronis OS selector with a SATA as the first bootable hard drive and followed by a bootable PATA hard drive (where I have iDeneb) a conflict can occur between which drive comes first sata or pata. So Acronis OS selector was removed.

 

I am not as familiar as I hope to be with OS X 86, but I thought that Darwin might indeed be similar to grub or possibly LILO. My intention was to just make the PATA drive boot first and use Darwin as the OS selector. So I booted from the PATA drive and Darwin came up and I hit F8 to see what was there and this is what I found for choices to boot.

 

hd(1,1) leopard

hd(1,5)

When I selected hd(1,1) OS X86 iDeneb booted.

When I selected hd(1,5) I got the no bootable media Insert disk thing. I think hd(1,5) was a location on the PATA drive that had a loader that actually loaded XP when Acronis was still installed. My intention was to modify the second entry in Darwin hd(1,5) to point to my XP installation on the SATA drive.

 

If I understand correctly, macgirl says that Darwin can't boot an OS on another hard drive. So if this is true, then there is no point in trying to modify Darwin to point to my XP installation. It would appear that baring a third party solution or using chain0 in the bootini file on XP, Darwin can not be used to multiboot across different hard drives.

 

Do I have this right?

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