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Dual Boot unbelievable frustration


cheti
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hey all!

 

I have tried everything under the sun to get my emachines t3985 machine to dual boot. Have the 10.4.4/5 mzar install. Details:

 

OSX on my 300 gb slave hard drive on a 45 gb active,primary partition. Xp on master hard drive.

Virgin install of 10.4.5. Not an upgrade. Currently can only boot if i have dvd in drive + i also have to change the boot order in bios to my make my slave hard drive the first boot

 

Tried the following :

 

1.Got the bless file from a kindred souls 10.4.3 dvd and tried all forms of sudo bless ./bless after placing the bless file in root directory and also in the hidden /bin dir and so on.

 

2.Tried logging into -s mode and repeated bless commands.

 

3.Tried loggin into install screen and changing the startup disk to my 10.4.5 partition.

 

4. Tried chain0 method wherein i copied chain0 from install dvd and added to my c:/ root and modified boot.ini. ONly to get a chain loading error at startup.

 

In the first two cases i got bless:commmand not found errors. even though a ls command right before performing the bless clearly shows the bless file. Also if i try running just the word 'bless' while i am in root directory, it says "/bin/bless permission denied". What in the? It sees the file and wants sudo access only, but when i give it a sudo command it says bless command not found!!!!!

 

Also, when i click on 'about this mac', it says my partition with the install of osx is the startup disk.

In all cases when i have restarted i cannot load into osx without dvd in drive. Darwin bootloader just does not appear. I get a "failure to load OS" error. :)

 

Also im not sure if i have some sort of 1024 cylinder limit(?) when i partitioned. Is there any way to check if this limit had been crossed when i created the partition?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. looking for a solution for weeks and i have gone through almost every single post in the forums about this issue and i have stalked all the chat rooms. please help :D

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In my first setup, my 300GB slave hard drive wasn't recognized properly. This results in many different problems. I tried to install Mac OS X on a partition on my slave, I installed it on a partition on my primary drive (80 GB with Windows XP). After all, I decided to use a dedicaded HD for OS X and everything is fine. To choose between the OS'es, I enter the bios and change boot order. In the early days of trying dual boot, I played around with different boot loaders and ended in a corrupted MBR.

I'm working with my setup for two weeks now, tomorrow I'll buy a new (faster) hard drive :)

 

dripple

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But many of us have the same problem, we aren't able to get the dual boot working. I've tried the chain0 method, Grub from a Linux distro, Grub for Windows, others boot managers (MBRMenu, GAC, Acronis...) without success. At last, I've put the OSX disk into an internal case that has a front switch to turn it on/off, this case is plugged into the first SATA connector. If the OSX disk is turned on, the PC boots OSX, otherwise, it boots Windows.

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Lazarus: Yeah ive tried pretty much the same things youve said. All the dual booters et al. I think the problme is with blessing the partition. I even managed to get the bless file but the bless command doesnt run from terminal even with sudo and all.

How do i manually install darwin bootlaoder onto my partition? Any ideas anyone ?

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Maybe this isnt the place for this question, but what is all this "bless" business? I dual-boot windows XP MCE 2005 and 10.4.5 and all I had to do was drop the chain0 in on my NTFS partition and change boot.ini a bit. I had windows already installed and added osX later. When my system boots, I get the windows boot selector with options for XP or 10.4.5. If i choose 10.4.5, i get the darwin bootloader and select my osX partition. Is the problem that people dont like this method or what?

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If all fails, install a trial copy of vmware and daemon tool. Mount the patched ISO in dt and creat a vm session as explained in maxxuss' site. Install OS X in secondary primary partition. No chain0 or bless is needed and you will use xloader toboot between xp and Mac. You'll get everything running in less then 30 minutes.

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Domino: Thanks fotr the suggestion. But i have already heavily customised my install of osx. I have over 3gig of mails and lots of apps and other things that i do not want to lose. Plus, I do not have much space to create another partition. I am assuming you meant for me to create a new install in a new partition.

 

Trixxie : Thanks for your reply. I had come across your suggestion early on in my search here, but i really really do not want to reinstall. Also my level of techpertise is at interm. noob. So playing with fdisk not an option methinks ;)

 

Additional info: I was only able to install osx after creating primary partition using disk part with id=af. Some os boot managers i used do not even recognise the os install. Acronis does not see mac osx but identifies the partition as having "Sha*g" format. Humorous but quite relevant in terms of dual bootability.

 

Any other suggestions guys? Come on.. Its been close to two weeks and ivve tried everything :happymac:

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Acronis didn't work for me, fu***d up my setup. Seems only to work for known partitions, HFS+ is not in there.

 

I suggest first a backup of your Mac OS, look for Xupport. You can try it a few days for free. Also CCcopy is working fine (freeware).

 

Do you have a spare HD laying round? The easiest way would be to put the drive in, format it using Mac OS X, copy all files over to this drive and set it as startup. Dualboot seems not a good idea with Mac OS X and Windows. There too many topics around saying that it [maybe, of course, not really, for shure, absolutely easy, safe, not] works. If you have different drives for each OS, you can use your BIOS to choose between. It's nearly the same than a bootloader, okay... 3 key presses more... :happymac:

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Domino: Thanks fotr the suggestion. But i have already heavily customised my install of osx...

 

No, you don't have to install to a new partition. Just mount your whole drive under vmware and install OS X in the partition you want it on. But first you have to back up everything on your home directory. The apps you will lose but it's not hard to reinstall right?

 

What happens is, when you install OS X under vmware or native, the OS will recognize any bootable partition, much like linux. You have to find out what is actually happening and why xloader isn't booting. Never mind chain0 since it will only complicate having two loaders on one system. Maybe the root of the problem is when you ran bless which actually mangled up the mbr and OS X could not see the first mbr during install.

 

What exactly are the error messages and are you using IDE, SATA, or external? We need to know because it's make or break using unsupported boards and drives. I'm not too familiar with emachines :happymac:

 

Note: Under vmware, If you have WinXP on drive 1 and OS X in drive 2, then you have to mount both drives in the same order as your physical drive location, even you cd rom. That way, when you reboot they system, OS X knows exactly where those drives and partition are.

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I had the best luck with Acronis.

 

It is a bit slow sometimes to start up into acronis itself, but it works perfectly and SWITCHs the active partition depending on what OS you load, so either the Mac Partition is Active or the XP is active :happymac:

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I can't boot without the DVD in the drive either (10.4.4+10.4.5 Patch).

 

When I set my OSX HDD as my primary in the bios and save the changes, it tells me that it "can't find a proper boot device or media" (the Darwin Bootloader doesn't even load).

 

Tried copying all the DVD's boot files to a USB flash drive (via WinXP) and setting it as a boot drive in the bios, doesn't work.

Added the drive location to the boot.plist, doesn't work.

Tried selecting the drive under StartUp Disk, then System Preferences automatically force-quits.

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