yochino Posted October 14, 2009 Share Posted October 14, 2009 If you own a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Board like I do, multibooting is ridiculously easy. I had built a rock solid Boot 132 Retail Leopard with a Darwin Bootloader following Weaksauce's Delicious Leopard Soup guide. (Search) I'm pretty sure any install of OSX will work with this method but don't quote me on this. I decided I wanted to get back into PC Gaming so I wanted to put windows on my system. I got it working and here's how. I took a spare SATA 80Gig HDD i had laying around. I connected it and boot up OSX. OSX found the drive and I went into Disk Utility and formatted the drive to FAT32. Once done, I rebooted my computer and went into BIOS settings at bootup and changed the boot order of my Harddrives making the 80Gig the primary boot drive. BEFORE I saved and exited, I put in my Windows 7 (I would think any version of Windows would work) CD then saved my BIOS settings then rebooted. The computer loaded up Windows 7 install upon reboot and I followed the prompts. *****Things to remember are that you need to reformat to NTFS and make SURE you format the right drive! DO NOT format the drive you have your OSX on or else you fail. Once you format, make SURE you're installing Windows onto the right drive* Follow the rest of the prompts and finish your Windows install. Now that you have both installed, reboot and go back into BIOS and reorder boot order so that the OSX boots first. Now, all you have to do to boot into Windows is during bootup (as soon as you see your motherboards splash screen) hit F12. As the computer proceeds to post, it'll pause and let you choose which HDD you want booted. Choose the HDD you just installed Windows on to boot into Windows. Adversely, if you want to just boot into OSX, don't hit F12 and just let your computer boot normally. I'm pretty sure the GA-EP45-DS3L has the F12 Boot function as well. Not sure what other Gigabyte Mobos have this. If you are using a Gigabyte Mobo and you have this option at boot, please post here for knowledge sake. With this method, you can have 2-3-4 OSes all sitting on different HDDs at your disposal. Hope this helps! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blackosx Posted October 14, 2009 Share Posted October 14, 2009 I use the GA-EP45-DS3L but if it's any use to you... There are many ways to dual boot OS X with windows. If you use the Chameleon v2 bootloader (now in RC3 status) on your OS X then you can leave your BIOS pointing to your HDD with OS X as default drive then have the option to select either OS X or Windows (Easy with Vista and Windows 7, harder with XP) from the boot menu. Better than using F12 in BIOS (which does work with this mobo too). Or if you want OS X and Windows 7 on the same HDD then see my guide here Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyberbuddhah Posted October 14, 2009 Share Posted October 14, 2009 Now, all you have to do to boot into Windows is during bootup (as soon as you see your motherboards splash screen) hit F12. As the computer proceeds to post, it'll pause and let you choose which HDD you want booted. Choose the HDD you just installed Windows on to boot into Windows. Adversely, if you want to just boot into OSX, don't hit F12 and just let your computer boot normally. With this method, you can have 2-3-4 OSes all sitting on different HDDs at your disposal. Hope this helps! Agree with master Blackosx If you install Chameleon V 2 RC3 on the first OS X boot drive then every thing, every OS system on any hard drive or partition should be recognized by Chameleon boot loader? Problem with F12 is you have to tap the key at " the right moment', else you have to re-start all over again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yochino Posted October 16, 2009 Author Share Posted October 16, 2009 Thanks for the info! Being a Hack noob, dealing with bootloaders was a very difficult concept for me. I read all over these forums and ran into a lot of posts of people having problems setting up Chameleon and such. I found that the method I posted is one of the easier options and a fail proof way of not screwing up an already existing solid OSX system. I also feel like it keeps both OSes completely separate from each other but that could just be my neuroticism. Either way, i thought i'd just provide an alternative to messing with bootloaders. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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