GRUB Cannot load Windows or Mac OS X

[NejiKun]

Well, I've just recently installed Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.5 on my computer, and I'm having some problems with my little GRUB boot loader.

 

I have 5-7 different partitions on my hard drive, 4 for operating systems (one that's ext3 that I haven't installed anything on it yet), one or two for Linux Swap, and one for media storage (NTFS) for my Windows partition.

 

In Windows, I resized one of my Linux partitions to create about 14.5 GB of free space for my Mac OS X install. Then, I formatted it to NTFS, and then booted the install DVD. I then opened up the Disk Utility and formatted that 14.5 GB partition to HFS+. I installed OS X on that partition and then rebooted.

 

When I got to GRUB, I selected "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" in the selection panel (since OS X wasn't present in GRUB, I assumed it was there) and then I got this little error:

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Booting 'Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition'

 

root (hd0,1)

Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7

savedefault

makeactive

chainloader +1

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

I'm pretty sure it isn't the DVD's fault, because I successfully installed it on my laptop with no problems, so then the problem could be that I put it in an extended partition, but I'm not too knowedgable about those kinds of things to know for sure.

 

One thing is for sure, I cannot erase my Windows partition, because it holds valuable information, if there isn't anything I can do about it, I'll probably have to move my files over to an external hard drive, or connect it as a secondary hard drive to another computer and upload my files from there.

 

If you people can help me, that would be awesome. Thanks.

[l0s3rk1d]

i use lilo anyway its easier :/

[NejiKun]

LILO creates a very large vacuum. I'd die before using LILO.

[Elv13]

the partition need to be type AF

the partition need to be primary

the partition need to be BEFORE extended

 

if grub was linking to the ext3 partition and you moved it, it will not load corectly anymore

 

remove the file system line from menu.lst/grub.conf

 

simply use the chain0 file to link grub to osx

[NejiKun]

Would deleting the OS X parition allow me to boot into Windows?

[Elv13]

not really

[NejiKun]

Then how would I be able to make the OSX partition primary and make it "need to be BEFORE extended" when fdisk isn't able to mount it?

[Elv13]

you can't move it, exepting with dd, you need to delete the partition before creating the new one, then install grub again and create a new menu.lst

[NejiKun]

Joy, wonderful. More work to do...[/sarcasm]

 

Let's assume that I'll remove GRUB and replace it with the standard Windows boot loader, could that bypass the problem?

[l0s3rk1d]

i had tried grub few months ago.. it cant detect the mac partition thats why i came up with lilo :/

[joblo10]

Grub doesn't detect the partition type (AF) but can boot without problem. Here's my grub.conf section for booting osx:

 

title OSX

root (hd1,0)

chainloader +1

 

hope this helps

[NejiKun]

Well, my problem isn't that I can't get into Mac, I don't really care about OS X right now. My problem is that I can't get into Windows to retrieve some documents that I want. But thanks for the suggestion, I'll just need to find the correct partition number for OS X.

[Elv13]

fdisk fixmbr 1

write that in a terminal somewhere, it will boot windows, you can add chain0 to boot.ini if you want to boot osx

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.ph...bootloader_boot