greatgoogalymoogaly Posted September 28, 2009 Share Posted September 28, 2009 Greetings. Although I'm no computer newbie, I'm stuck on one tiny aspect of a dual-boot. Windows 7 is already on its own (SATA) hard drive. (I want to keep it that way) I want iATKOS on a seperate (PATA) hard drive. There are tons of guides on dual booting, but oddly enough, none of them seem to specifically explain how to do it for seperate hard drives. (They're all for single hard drive with partitions?) Since I've got a 650i Ultra mobo, i'm using this guide http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=87901 Using all the same circumstances (1.0 r3, matching md5), same settings. The only difference is I'm using a separate hard drive. The install goes perfectly except for one detail. There's no way to boot afterward. **The guide does mention something like "Partition the drive as MBR if using a separate drive", however I don't see an option like this in the OS X disk utility. I've tried booting from the win7 disk and making drive 1 (the osx drive) active, but it shows a message that "The active command can only be used on fixed mbr disks." I can't figure what to tweak for seperate hard drives. Maybe I'm missing something in one of the guides, but I'm not seeing it. Help? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/189245-dualboot-on-seperate-hard-drives-how/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Santora Posted September 28, 2009 Share Posted September 28, 2009 It can be done several ways. I'm running an Asus P5q Deluxe and on boot I hit F8. This gives me a Chooser screen which allows me to choose where to boot from. Makes life very easy. It recognizes all drives, including networked and usb. Your mobo might offer something similar. Also, you can boot the mac drive as your primary, have Darwin 2.0 come up and offer you which os to boot into. But the windows drive is then your secondary. Mark Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/189245-dualboot-on-seperate-hard-drives-how/#findComment-1282651 Share on other sites More sharing options...
greatgoogalymoogaly Posted September 28, 2009 Author Share Posted September 28, 2009 It can be done several ways. I'm running an Asus P5q Deluxe and on boot I hit F8. This gives me a Chooser screen which allows me to choose where to boot from. Makes life very easy. It recognizes all drives, including networked and usb. Your mobo might offer something similar. Also, you can boot the mac drive as your primary, have Darwin 2.0 come up and offer you which os to boot into. But the windows drive is then your secondary. Mark By hitting esc, I can choose a boot device, but when choosing the OSX drive I get "Chain booting error: Bootmgr is missing" or similar. I'd prefer to have an OS choosing-screen if possible (from either OS. Not picky here.), but as long as it runs I'll be happy. Any ideas? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/189245-dualboot-on-seperate-hard-drives-how/#findComment-1282655 Share on other sites More sharing options...
greatgoogalymoogaly Posted September 28, 2009 Author Share Posted September 28, 2009 *bump* Curiosity: Is installing on separate hard drives somehow MUCH more complicated? I've literally seen zero guides describing how, no matter how I search, and no one seems to know. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/189245-dualboot-on-seperate-hard-drives-how/#findComment-1283435 Share on other sites More sharing options...
srs5694 Posted September 28, 2009 Share Posted September 28, 2009 Curiosity: Is installing on separate hard drives somehow MUCH more complicated? No -- at least, not if your boot loader supports multiple drives. (I'm not sure how common such support is in OSx86 boot loaders.) Ideally, it's just a matter of partitioning two disks and pointing the installer(s) at the correct drive(s). In fact, using multiple drives can sometimes simplify things. For instance, you can use MBR partitions on one drive for booting Windows and partition using GPT on another drive for OS X. (Recent versions of Windows can use GPT drives for data, but not to boot when using a BIOS-based system, so you could still put a shared data partition on the GPT drive, if that's convenient.) In an all-MBR configuration, using multiple drives gives you more primary partitions, which can be handy if you're installing many OSes that need primary partitions to themselves, such as most versions of Windows and the BSDs. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/189245-dualboot-on-seperate-hard-drives-how/#findComment-1283551 Share on other sites More sharing options...
kromakey Posted September 28, 2009 Share Posted September 28, 2009 Hi , multibooting it is not dificult , I use F12 of my Motherboard and Chameleon bootloader to choose from 5 diferent Operating Systems , here a video showing I have 3 discs . 1st Vista+Snow 2nd Leeopard 3rd 7+xp made it just for fun , my first Penta Boot Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/189245-dualboot-on-seperate-hard-drives-how/#findComment-1283665 Share on other sites More sharing options...
enochpc Posted February 11, 2010 Share Posted February 11, 2010 Hello all. I know this post is a couple months old, but thought I would pipe in. I'm planning on trying iDeneb v1.4 on my current main machine. It's a Gigabyte board 965g chipset I think, AM3 anyway. I currently have Windows 7 64bit installed, and I have a spare 100gb SATA drive to play with. My plan is to unplug my current three drives in the machine, put in the 100gb drive, and attempt to install OSX. If I can get it to function nice, then I will plug in my old hard drives again. If my experience with windows is correct, Windows 7 will boot by default, and I should be able to push f12 on boot up and choose the new/old drive to boot OSX. I'll follow up here to let everyone knows how it works, since separate drives has always been my preference for multi-boots, of course I've never had much success but we will see. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/189245-dualboot-on-seperate-hard-drives-how/#findComment-1408216 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Limpster Posted February 13, 2010 Share Posted February 13, 2010 @enchopc thats what i have done. unplugged my W7 HDD, installed OSX on the other HDD (with Cham bootloader), then plugged my W7 HDD in again. After that it boots up as i wish (Windows 7 primary boot device) and with F12 (Gigabyte Board) i can choose the oder HDD with OSX. The only problem i have (and i dont know why): my OSX Desktop wont show up when both HDDs are plugged in. If i unplug the Windows HDD everything boots up correctly. But if it is plugged in, OSX is gettin stuck after loading the Apple briefly befor the Desktop appears. Sometimes i can boot up in safemode, somethimes it just gets stuck there with a light blue background. But normally it will work with 2 HDDs especially when u unplug one HDD so that the bootloader cant affect the other HDD. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/189245-dualboot-on-seperate-hard-drives-how/#findComment-1409468 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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