Dual Boot Vista & OSX without Vista DVD on Dell Inspiron 1525

[own]

Hi I have found a great and easy way to accomplish dual boot with Vista on the Dell Inspiron 1525 without using the Vista DVD (as Dell did not ship that), and thus never destroying the original Vista bootloader, nor the recovery or media direct functionality. Here is what I did (taking bits and pieces from others and add a little of myself):

 

Part 1. Install Mac OS on EXTERNAL HD

Use an external HD and use Disk Utility from your favorite distribution and create 2 (or more if you like) partitions of 15 GB, formatted for MacOS. You may opt to format a 3rd partition as MSDOS for copying files back and forth between Vista to OSX. This could also be done with a USB memory stick.

On the first partition install MacOS from your favorite distribution to create an always working OS X environment. I use Kalyway 10.5.2 as this does not need any tweaking, with working AirPort.

The second partition will be the install that will be transferred to you internal HD later. To create it, you have two choices:

a. if your install on partition 1 is to your liking, you may use Disk Utility to “restore” partition 1 to partition 2. Do not forget to rename partition 2 (using finder) afterwards otherwise they will have the same name.

b. in my case, I installed OS X again from a 10.5.6 distribution (in my case XxX, but could be iPC or iAtkos or whatever you prefer). Reason for this is that after the first reboot, I booted into my 10.5.2 and performed all needed tweaks on the 10.5.6 install including pre-login sleeptrick before booting my new 10.5.6.

 

Part 2. Prepare your internal Dell HardDisk

When shipped, the Dell contains the following partitions:

-Dell Utility

-Recovery

-OS

-MediaDirect

Using a GParted Live CD (I needed to select copy to RAM option to get it working) make the following changes:

a. Shrink partition “OS” to free space for OSX. Be very aware that your “OS” partition is NOT moved (check the description at the bottom of the window) as this will ensure Vista will NOT boot. (Yes this happened to me…)

b. Grow the extended partition where MediaDirect resides to fill the space that was freed in the previous action

c. Create a new partition in the unallocated space, type of filesystem is not important, I used ext2 but we will change that later anyway.

 

Part 3. Transfer of OSX to Internal HD

Reboot into your first OSX partition.

Start Disk Utility

Use the Restore tab to copy your other (good) OSX partition to the just created partition on the Dell Internal HD

Optional: Rename either the partition on the external HD or on the Internal HD to be able to distinguish between them later.

copy the file /usr/standalone/i386/chain0 to your thumbdrive or 3rd partition.

 

Part 4. Modify Vista Bootloader

Boot into Vista

Open command prompt as administrator

Optionally type “bcdedit /enum active” to print out the active boot entries.

Type “bcdedit /create /d “Mac OS X” /application osloader”. you will get a response with a “GUID”, like {3af771a9-fe5b-11da-98b0-adee5d1fa074}. In the next staps I will refer to that as {GUID}, but you need to replace that with the number that was returned.

Type “bcdedit /set {GUID} PATH \chain0″

Type “bcdedit /set {GUID} device boot”

Type “bcdedit /displayorder {GUID} /addlast”

Close the command prompt

Copy the chain0 file to the root of C:

 

Unlike what I have read in several places, the OSX partition can be found in a logical partition of an extended partition.

 

Part 5. Boot OSX from your internal HD

Remove your external HD

Reboot

In the Bootloader select “Mac OS X”

Tadaa!

 

Part 6: Use of the external HD instals:

I choose to leave the clean 10.5.2 install plus the packsand descriptions for all tweaks as a failsafe.

The second partition I left as well as a testbed for future upgrades.

The remiander of the drive I splitted into a TimeMachine Partition and an MSDOS (FAT32) partition for shared Vista and Mac Backup, mainly photos and homevideos (cannot have enough backups for those).