Vista/OS X MBR bootloader woes

[flashjazzcat]

Hi,

 

Haven't been on the forum for a while because I had everything running sweet (Leo4all 4.1.1) and I was pretty happy just to have OS X 10.5.5 to boot into now and again. It wasn't too stable, though: apps would tend to shut down after an hour or so and then refuse to launch again ("The application cannot be launched"). I wanted to do development for old Atari 8 bit systems using the Atari800MacX emulator so the OS had attained more than novelty value. So I was messing around with Software Update the other day, and it ruined the install. No problem: revert to the disk image I had just made from within Vista. Sadly the disk image was corrupt so I had to reinstall OS X. That part went OK (still using Leo4all 4.1.1 cause it's the only one I can get working).

 

One thing isn't working: my dual boot. I used to have the Vista bootloader set up so I could boot into Vista or Leopard. It worked perfectly the way I had set it up with EasyBCD. Now I just can't get it to work again: I keep getting "Chain booting error" when selecting OS X. I've done everything the way I did it when I first installed OS X last September: disconnected the other 2 SATA HDDs, installed Leo onto the third HDD from a SATA DVD, rebooted, set up the OS. Then I shut down, reconnect the other two HDDs, set the BIOS to boot from the Vista volume, boot into Vista, copy chain0 from the Mac partition to Vista's partition, rename it NST_MAC.MBR. All I get now is "Chain booting error".

 

I spent eight hours on this yesterday trying to figure out what had changed: it's all the same hardware, everything. Vista SP2 is the only new ingredient??? I almost went down the NeoGrub route but I couldn't get that working either and the screen was beseiged with messages anyway. I need to keep the Vista bootloader (ahem), but I'm struggling to understand what I did right last time or what I've done wrong this time.

 

I know Chain booting errors are a common problem but all the Internet seaching I've done is leading me round in circles. Lots of the relevant forum posts are rather old, too. It seems to me that Vista isn't the problem: it's running NST_MAC.MBR just fine. It's the chain loader which just isn't hooking up to the mac partition properly.

[flashjazzcat]

OK... I fixed this tonight and I figure the solution might be useful to others.

 

The Mac OS partition was unrecognized by programs like Acronis Disk Director, where before I'd been able to set it as active, etc. The whole Mac disk setup seemed different to before. There was also a 200MB EFI partition at the front of the disk and I suspected that was giving me problems and causing the "Chain Booting Error".

 

So: I first backed up the main OS X partition using Paragon Drive Backup. I didn't back up the drive structure, just the Mac partition. I then went into Diskpart in Vista and cleaned the entire disk (Mac OS resides on its own drive). Then, with a totally empty drive, I used Disk Director to create an NTFS partition which filled the drive. Finally, I went back to Drive Backup and restored the image of the Mac drive to the disk. Result: the EFI partition was gone, and Disk Director now handles the partition (as 0xAF ShagOS Swap). I was able to set the partition as active and now the Vista MBR bootloader picks up Darwin perfectly as before.