Help with dualbooting needed!

[swede420]

I have

 

HD1: 1 Partition MBR

 

1:Windows 7: Windows 7 Ultimate

 

HD2: 3 Partitions GUID

 

1:Snow Leopard: Snow Leopard

2:Cham: Chameleon 2 RC1

3:Data: .....

 

 

Chameleon cant boot Windows 7 (error: BOOTMGR NOT FOUND). How can i fix it?

[srs5694]

A key question is whether that error message is coming from Chameleon or the Windows boot loader. I suspect (but am far from certain) that it's a Windows error message. Googling the phrase tends to support that suspicion. If so, there are two likely causes, each with a different solution:

 

• When you installed OS X (or at some other point), the Windows boot became disrupted because of changes to partition sizes, overwriting the boot partition's boot loader, or some other cause. If this is the source of the problem, then running your Windows installation disc and selecting the system recovery option is likely (but not certain) to fix the problem. Unfortunately, Windows is inordinately sensitive to such problems, and in my experience, the recovery options provided by Microsoft are often inadequate. Personally, I just re-install whenever something like this gets too bad, but this may not be an option for everybody.
  
• Chameleon may be playing with drive IDs in such a way that Windows is getting confused. That is, Windows is expecting to boot from "drive 1" (or the computer's code for this), but because Chameleon is on "drive 2," it's rejiggering the numbers so that "drive 1" looks to Windows to be "drive 2" and vice-versa, thus confusing Windows. There may be a Chameleon-specific fix to this problem, but if so, I don't know what it is. Personally, I use GRUB as my primary boot loader, and it's got an option called "map" to remap drive IDs (e.g., "map (hd0) (hd1)" followed by "map (hd1) (hd0)" to swap the two drives' identities). One of my multi-boot systems has one PATA drive and one SATA drive, and I needed to play with these options a lot before I could get everything to boot cleanly. You may need to research the Chameleon equivalents, and/or add another boot loader to the mix to get this to work. As a temporary (or awkward long-term) workaround, you may be able to use BIOS options to do the same thing. Most modern BIOSes have a boot-time option to select the boot device, and you may be able to use this to bypass Chameleon and boot the Windows disk directly. (The effectiveness of this approach depends on whether Chameleon put its boot0 code on your first or second disk, though.) In fact, I'd try this first since it's the least likely to cause further damage to your system.
  

[swede420]

A key question is whether that error message is coming from Chameleon or the Windows boot loader. I suspect (but am far from certain) that it's a Windows error message. Googling the phrase tends to support that suspicion. If so, there are two likely causes, each with a different solution:

 

• When you installed OS X (or at some other point), the Windows boot became disrupted because of changes to partition sizes, overwriting the boot partition's boot loader, or some other cause. If this is the source of the problem, then running your Windows installation disc and selecting the system recovery option is likely (but not certain) to fix the problem. Unfortunately, Windows is inordinately sensitive to such problems, and in my experience, the recovery options provided by Microsoft are often inadequate. Personally, I just re-install whenever something like this gets too bad, but this may not be an option for everybody.
  
• Chameleon may be playing with drive IDs in such a way that Windows is getting confused. That is, Windows is expecting to boot from "drive 1" (or the computer's code for this), but because Chameleon is on "drive 2," it's rejiggering the numbers so that "drive 1" looks to Windows to be "drive 2" and vice-versa, thus confusing Windows. There may be a Chameleon-specific fix to this problem, but if so, I don't know what it is. Personally, I use GRUB as my primary boot loader, and it's got an option called "map" to remap drive IDs (e.g., "map (hd0) (hd1)" followed by "map (hd1) (hd0)" to swap the two drives' identities). One of my multi-boot systems has one PATA drive and one SATA drive, and I needed to play with these options a lot before I could get everything to boot cleanly. You may need to research the Chameleon equivalents, and/or add another boot loader to the mix to get this to work. As a temporary (or awkward long-term) workaround, you may be able to use BIOS options to do the same thing. Most modern BIOSes have a boot-time option to select the boot device, and you may be able to use this to bypass Chameleon and boot the Windows disk directly. (The effectiveness of this approach depends on whether Chameleon put its boot0 code on your first or second disk, though.) In fact, I'd try this first since it's the least likely to cause further damage to your system.
  

 

 

Ok Thanks.

I am fully able to boot to windows when i change the primary boot device to my first hd, then my pc boots to windows directly but if i change it back it goes to chameleon and from there i cant boot windows 7.

[srs5694]

Ok Thanks.

I am fully able to boot to windows when i change the primary boot device to my first hd, then my pc boots to windows directly but if i change it back it goes to chameleon and from there i cant boot windows 7.

 

Then I suspect that Chameleon is mucking with the drive identification in such a way that it's confusing Windows. You might try looking for Chameleon options that would affect this behavior, but I'm not sure where you should look -- as far as I can tell, Chameleon is very poorly documented. Another option would be try try another OSx86-specific boot loader (PC-EFI, say), but that runs the risk of making things worse. If you've got a little free space for a new partition (even a very small one), you could try setting up GRUB, which is well documented and has options to swap drive IDs around to suit your needs, but you may need to install and maintain it from a Linux emergency disk. You could also look into Windows-specific boot loaders, such as EasyBCD. I've never used it, but some people seem to like it a lot, and it (or another Windows boot loader) might just help you work around your problem.