Can't load OSX without DVD in - SOLVED

[macjohn]

I've got my laptop loaded with WinXP, Mandriva Spring 2009 KDE, and the IPC OSX 10.5.6. I've got 6 partitions on my 500 GB drive. They are as follows:

 

WinXP

Win XP (NTFS)

RECOVERY (FAT32)

 

Mandriva

SDA6 (ext3)

SDA7 (SWAP)

 

OSX

SDA8 (Leopard)

SDA9 (Time Machine)

 

I've consistently been able to get dual boot working between winxp and mandriva... either with the vista bootloader driving things, GRUB, or XP. What I haven't been able to do is get OSX to boot without having the 10.5.6 DVD in. I have to have it in, wait for the 'press F8' prompt... eject the DVD, then I get a darwin boot menu and can load either windows or OSX from that (the Linux option doesn't work there).

 

My question is... what can I do within OSX (or the other OS's) to get the boot working? I've tried copying the chain0 file to my windows drive and editing the boot.ini. I've loaded BCD and the Vista bootloader and followed the instructions well enough to get linux booting... but not the mac.

 

I have another PC (not a laptop) running the same configuration with the Vista Bootloader except all three installations are on separate drives.

 

The only way I've been able to get the Mac to boot was by going into a partition utility and setting it to be active (which I accidentally hosed my WinXP installation in the process). I have plenty of spare hard drives so I have all these things fully backed up.

 

Oh, I've also just finished loading Chameleon 2.0 on the mac and nothing is different.

 

Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

 

SOLVED ===========

posting my solution more for my benefit than anyone else (since I'm sure one day I'll try to do this again and will want to remember how).

 

I gathered a lot of information from other posts with similar subjects as mine, one important point is that the Mac OS be on an active partition. I think I just made some bad clicks in my partition editing program and hosed my windows install accidentally while trying to activate my Mac partition.

 

Anyway, the end solution was to just completely start over on the drive, I created the first partition to be the Mac OS, (active primary partition), then another active primary partition for windows (didn't know you could do 2 but my partitioning program let me and I wasn't going to argue), and a third logical partition for linux. I installed OSX 10.5.6, booted fine into it, then did a drive to drive copy to get my XP installation copied back to partition 2, then installed Linux. Grub was pointed to the Mac and Windows partition and both Linux and the Mac booted fine. The problem came with Windows then.

 

My windows installation was originally in the first partition so by moving it to the second partition, I needed to change my boot.ini file on the windows drive to reflect partition 2 instead of position 1 (there's 2 lines to change it on, I changed both). Once that was done, all three booted fine.

 

Summary of solution: make sure mac is installed on an active/primary partition and if changing windows partition numbers, update the boot.ini file.