Can I dual boot nicely from pre-existant Win7 MBR Disk?

[flacker]

Hi. I would think that lots of people would share my situation of wanting to add an OSX volume to an existing Windows 7 drive that is already MBR-partitioned. I've been searching around the Forum and have gotten somewhat confused.

I already got bitten once after using Diskutil merely to format a volume as Mac, which somehow corrupted my bootmanager and led to a lengthy process of unsuccessfully trying to use the Win7 install disk to repair booting, whether automatically or via bootrec, etc. at the command prompt (N.B. your installation disk isn't necessarily compatible with what you installed from it when it comes to repairs! You might have to download a separate 32 or 64 repair disk for Win7.)

Anyway, what was I saying?

Right! So how the hell can I install my MacOS, which I've gotten running adequately from an external drive, onto my already perfectly-fine-thank-you internal MBR-partitioned disk nicely running Win7 such that I can dual-boot and WITHOUT trashing my Win7 install?!

Now I HAVE already cloned the external OSX volume onto my internal drive (thank you, Carbon Copy Cloner), so I think it's ready to go. I resorted to cloning since it seemed that conventional installation demanded a GUID-partitioned disk.

So I think all I really need to do is to install a bootloader that will allow me to choose between OSX/Win7, and can do so on a pure MBR disk. I am okay if it does involve temporarily hurting the Win7 bootloader, as I now have experience with repairing that, but what is the best way to deal with this MBR drive, please?

[flacker]

Well, I guess I figured it out. Seems I was already pretty much there.

Just installed EasyBCD and added a menu item to it for a Mac boot option, and it finds it by itself, presenting me with a boot menu for either of the two OS's!

It might be a little redundant as Chameleon, after I choose a OSX86 boot, also offers me the option of booting WIn7 if I hit F8. But then I wasn't able to get to Chameleon before installing, anyways; setting the OSX partition as active with GpartEd merely gave me a "missing operating system" message.

 

So I'm reasonably pleased just now.

 

Just need to tweak a few more things, e.g. native display, better mouse response, sleep, and possibly on-board wireless (unlikely with Atheros on 64bit).

[Auzeras]

Yes, that is what I have done. If you set the bootloader type as EFI (default) then it will boot into chameleon 2 (if installed) if you set it as MBR then if chameleon 1 is installed to the MBR it will boot using that. either way it works. have a play with the settings. right now I have a 2 seccond time out to the default OS.

[flacker]

Cheers, Auzeras!