Triple booting with rEFit

[johne53]

According to the rEFit home page, this is a good place to get advice about using the rEFit boot manager (not sure why they don't have their own forum, but anyway....)

 

For various reasons I need to triple boot my Mac Mini between OS-X, Windows 7 and some other version of Windows (probably XP eventually but for the moment, I'm just trying a second Win7 partition). I also need to have a FAT32 partition that all the OSs can see and write to. Because the Mac also needs an EFI partition, this makes 5 partitions in all. Windows itself is comfortable with this because although the underlying drive is GPT, Boot Camp "fudges" a fake MBR (so that Windows thinks there are only four partitions). But some lower level apps (for example Paragon's Drive Backup) aren't happy with it at all because they see the drive as being invalid (i.e. having an MBR partitioning scheme but too many partitions). Therefore I need to rid myself of one partition.

 

According to the Myths and Facts page at the rEFit web site, Macs do not necessarily need either GPT or EFI. OS-X will run happily on a drive formatted for the MBR partitioning scheme and indeed, the EFI partition on a Mac is actually empty! To use an MBR drive, all you need to do is install OS-X onto a GPT drive and then copy the whole partition to an MBR drive.

 

Yesterday I backed up all my partitions using Paragon's Drive Backup. This performs a block-level backup, giving me an exact replica of the original partition (i.e. it doesn't just copy files, like most of the Mac utilities do).

 

This morning I bought and fitted a new MBR drive and restored the OS-X partition from my backup. This was highly successful and I soon had OS-X up and running. Things haven't gone so well with the Win7 partition though. Initially, I simply restored the backed up partition from yesterday but although both the Mac (and rEFit) could see it, I got this error when trying to launch Windows 7:-

 

autochk program not found - skipping AUTOCHECK

 

at which point, Windows resets itself.

 

Next I tried creating a second Win7 partition by installing a completely fresh installation from my Win7 Setup disk. But although the installation seemed to go fine, I get this error when I try to launch it:-

 

BOOTMGR is missing

 

Note that with the new drive I bought today, I haven't involved Boot Camp yet at any stage. I've simply created (or restored) partitions as appropriate. The rEFit web site is quite adamant that rEFit can be used for triple booting in my scenario but clearly I've done something wrong. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to why this didn't work?

 

It was all working fine on the GPT drive BTW - although I only had one Windows partition on that.