Vista / Retail Leopard on GPT

[BassBlu]

I am setting this thread aside for those of us working on getting Vista and Leo on a single HDD. I know the easy fix would be to simply install another HDD that is dedicated to windows, but for those of us that have cases without room it is not feasible.

 

I know many of you will insist that XP is the way to go here, leaving room to switch back and forth between AHCI and Native IDE mode. The fact is that Vista has support for AHCI out of the box (and personally for me, the way my disk is set up my bios will not detect my hdd in native IDE mode. Besides I want dx10 to be enabled in my games).

 

This is where the problem sets in. The disks are partitioned using the GPT scheme. There are mixed reports on Vista and GPT support, but from what I have gathered vista sp1 supposedly has support for the GPT partition table. One piece of information I found says that in order for vista to work with GPT, EFI must be used in stead of the bios. ( http://www.itworld.com/nlswindows070220 ) The article is not explicit as to how this is done, but it seems to me that there should be propensity for making the single hdd dual system work.

 

Where I am:

Hardware:

- Gigabyte EP45-DQ6

- ICH10 SB (working with retail Leo)

- WD Velociraptor 300gb (SATA II)

- The rest is not relevant to this discussion

EFI:

- Chameleon EFI

- Boot camp will not initialize "Update computer boot ROM"

Leopard:

- Fully working Retail install

Vista: (sp1 install disc w/ all versions (for testing))

- Installation environment loads appropriately

- Partitioner starts and detects all partitions accurately

- Formatting allowed (NTFS, create, delete, etc.) and working

- Cannot install with the classic error that windows cannot install on a GPT system.

 

 

There is also a lot of information on rEFIt being able to create the hybrid MBR/EFI system which I have seen first hand with rEFIt's success on my first gen MBP. Unfortunately after a seemingly successful install of rEFIt on the EP45-DQ6 machine there is no refit menu upon boot-up.

 

I will continue to research and adapt my methods, but any help is greatly appreciated!

 

- BassBlu

[Dr. Hurt]

You motherboard does not have UEFI, so so cannot install rEFIt. Also, boot camp can only be installed on a real Mac. Vista (apparently) only supports GPT on UEFI systems (like real macs and x58 chipsets). OS X disk utility creates a hybrid MBR/GPT only if you let the last partition on the disk be FAT32 (ms-dos). Otherwise, you'll get the Vista GPT error.