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I picked up a Gigabyte EP45-DS3P as the board for a new hackie. For the most part, I was able to get it working. Installation was a snap, definitely easier than I thought it would be. It's a dual drive system, one for Windows, one for OS X. Windows was already installed and running without a hitch. In any case, I got Chameleon installed...and that's when I started getting pissed off.

 

First off, Chameleon didn't work as it should have. I didn't do anything special, just ran the installer and let it go. For one, it wouldn't properly execute boot commands such as -v or -f. It would wind up giving me a black screen with a white bar at the top. It may be worth noting that I'm using a Sapphire Radeon 4830 (DVI/VGA/HDMI) that doesn't have any real support yet, but that shouldn't bungle up Chameleon. In addition, I couldn't boot Windows from Chameleon. It would hang immediately after choosing it. I'd have to go into the BIOS and switch the boot order. I'd also have to turn off AHCI as it would BSOD XP if I didn't.

 

So I did some digging and found out that Chameleon 2rc1 doesn't like some dual drive configs. Wonderful. I wish that had been made clear before hand. The recommendation was to use Gparted to carve an HFS+ partition on the Windows drive and use that as my Chameleon boot drive. Okay, so I did so...except that OS X wouldn't recognize the partition as HFS+ (Nice one, Gparted. What's the point of adding HFS+ support if it doesn't work?), calling it a Linux partition. It also refused to reformat it, citing an issue with the partition map. Lovely.

 

Okay, so I backed up data from my Windows partition and wiped the drive. I then diced off a 250MB slice in the Windows installer, then installed Windows, then booted to the OS X partition. I was able to format the small partition to HFS+. Great, it should work, right? Wrong, of course! Chameleon didn't even want to install right off. I had to copy the package to the partition to do so. Then I was able to set the Windows partition as the primary boot drive. Problem is, Chameleon didn't even load. I got a boot0 error not long after it started booting from the drive.

 

I'm about ready to chuck this damned thing through a window. I know this computer is fine. It ran Windows with no trouble at all and chewed through numerous stress tests. Yet it seems that none of the guides on here are working properly, and that's made all the more frustrating by people in the threads saying that it did. Can someone PLEASE tell me how to get dual boot working properly on this damn thing with Chameleon? If I can just get that working right, I'll be fine in waiting for the 4830 to get supported once 10.5.7 shows up. Until then, I have to use Windows. If I have to burn down both drives or even get a larger drive and partition it in half, that's fine. I just want this accursed thing to work!

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AHA! Got it! Apparently Chameleon only likes to work from a Windows drive if the HFS+ partition is at the beginning of the disc! I used GParted to delete the HFS+ partition at the end and created a new one at the beginning. Took a while, but at least this time Disk Utility was able to format the new partition. Reboot from the Windows drive and Chameleon loaded! Windows wont boot (Missing hal.dll crapola), but I don't mind reinstalling. At least now I know that it works and I can now use this thing reliably once the 4830 support is there.

 

Anyone else run into this kind of funkiness with Chameleon?

Aaaand nope. Spoke too soon. Chameleon is now working from the Windows partition, but only in IDE mode. It throws an "Operating System could not be loaded" or some such error right after verifying DMI pool data if AHCI is on. Wonderful! Back to square one! In addition, I think my DS3P is bad. If I overclock at all, it seems to think it's unstable and does it's little reversion thing, even on overclocks that I KNOW are stable. This is just wonderful. Shoot me now.

 

Can someone PLEASE lend some advice to get dual boot working on this accursed thing?

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