How I got my system to dual boot Vista & OSX

[Rambutan!!!]

Hi all, I am a complete noob at this but thought I'd share how I got my Dell XPS m1530 to dual boot vista and OSX. Nothing new but it might help someone out.

 

Well firstly I decided to try and keep my origional vista partition instead of a reload, probably would have been easier to just start from a blank HD. I'd just like to reiterate that physical disks start from 0 and partitions start from 1 if anyone is confused when doing fdisk commands etc. To do this I needed to shrink my vista partiton to make a 20GB partition for OSX.

 

I cleaned up a bunch of {censored} off the vista partition then defragged, then tried to do a shrink in vista, this did not work. I then got GParted Live (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php) loaded onto a USB key, booted it up and shrank the vista partition (took about 4 hours but got there). A tip if you have a m1530 - just use the F12 boot selecter instead of changing bios settings all the time to boot from USB keys etc. Vista booted fine after the partition shrink (it did want to chkdsk itself though).

 

I now had my 20GB partition all ready for OSX, probably should have made it 30-40GB really. I installed Kalyway 10.5.2 AMD/Intel with vanilla kernel. After the install OSX would boot up fine if I had the Kalyway disc still in the drive and boot to vista of the HD.

 

Now I wanted to use the Darwin boot loader not vista's so I booted up GParted and set the OSX partition as boot. The boot manager would fire up but got the HFS+ error when trying to boot into OSX. I tried a couple of guides to fix this but ended up booting into OSX through the Kalyway and did a volume repair with OSX disk utility. This fixed the HFS+ error but hosed the vista partition.

 

I started getting an error when ever I chose vista from the Darwin boot manager that \windows\system32\winloaded.exe was missing or corrupt. OK, I then booted up my vista install disc thinking a quick repair would fix it: fail. vista repair util failed to even recognise a vista install on the machine. I then tried a {censored} load of things till it dawned on my that it was probably only looking at the bootable partition: win.

 

So I booted GParted back up (yeah I know you can do this through fdisk but there is less chance of me ing it up though GParted) and changed the boot partition back to vista, loaded the vista repair util off the install disc, it then saw my vista install and repaired it.

 

At one point GParted hosed itself on the USB key (or maybe OSX hosed it), just copy it back and it should be fine.

 

I can now boot into vista and OSX!!!! woot. Just updated to 10.5.5, installed the iPhone SDK and updated my iPhone to 2.2, all is well.

 

Thats my story so far, BIG thanks to everyone at insanelymac for helping!

 

 

Seeyas!