CL Corwin Legendre Posted August 31, 2010 Share Posted August 31, 2010 Can't get Windows XP to boot...I'm running OSX10.5.8 and Windows 7 Ultimate dual boot on my first hard drive (250GB) and I just installed XP on my 320GB second disk tonight. What the case is - is that when I installed XP I decided to take out the first drive, hoping I wouldn't screw something up - but it's XP with the error and the error is "Disk read error, ctrl+alt+del to restart" Now, 7 and Mac still boot fine. But I need XP for some programs and I don't want to reinstall Mac or 7 - in fact, reinstalling those systems is NOT an option. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted August 31, 2010 Share Posted August 31, 2010 You can use 'Windows XP mode' that comes with Windows 7 Ultimate. It comes with a free copy of Windows XP (downloaded on the first run) and works very well for anything but DirectX/OpenGL games - there's no hardware accelerated graphics, just basic DirectDraw support. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CL Corwin Legendre Posted August 31, 2010 Author Share Posted August 31, 2010 yeah, I know about XP mode but it doesn't pack power for games or 3D work applications.... .....and 7 doesn't want to run them efficiently. So I need to get XP working without redoing all this {censored} again! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted August 31, 2010 Share Posted August 31, 2010 Try unplugging your other drive and plug the XP drive into the first SATA port. See if it will boot then. If that works, then plug in your OS X drive into the second SATA port and set the drive order in the BIOS so that the OS X drive is the first boot device. You should then be able to boot XP from the Chameleon boot menu - or you can use the BIOS boot selector (F8 on my motherboard) to pick your XP drive. Not sure if this will work but try it and see. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CL Corwin Legendre Posted August 31, 2010 Author Share Posted August 31, 2010 I'll try that in the morning and get back to you - if anyone else has any suggestions for this, let me know. I may ditch 7 at some point - but they were on the same drive and then I noticed the 320GB on the shelf and decided to install XP on it instead of redoing the whole install....since I hate working with both mac and windows when it comes to installing them! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CL Corwin Legendre Posted August 31, 2010 Author Share Posted August 31, 2010 And, that didn't work. Still getting the same error, but it boots BEAUTIFULLY when it's the only drive, or listed as the master drive.....but then I can't really get into my 7/Mac arrangement without issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted August 31, 2010 Share Posted August 31, 2010 Okay, at least you're getting somewhere. Windows 7 isn't as picky as XP, it will run fine from hard drive #2 (it does here) so until you find a way, you can use the BIOS boot selector to boot from the drive that holds OS X and Windows 7. If you do this, you shouldn't have to change 'hide partition' or other partition settings in /extra/com.apple.Boot.plist, since those are relative to where Chameleon is installed and therefore physical drive order doesn't matter. Look in the multibooting/Virtualization sub forum for help on how to get it to work the way you want. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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