Edit chameleon boot list to load windows 7

[ghostdog 5.0]

I have a windows 7 on one drive and 10.6.7 on another hard drive (not a partition of the same drive).

 

Is there a way I can edit some list like the boot.ini on windows 7 or com.apple.boot.plist ?

 

I am running Chameleon 2.0 rc4 on the osx drive. I installed windows 7 separate after getting osx running perfectly (the osx drive was disconnected while I did this).

 

Basically I am looking for a way to edit Chameleon to have an option to move the cursor to select windows, which I imagine is some sort of list that says disk0s2 and another option would be disk1s2.

[3.14r2]

Usually Chameleon displays (if it is not set otherwise using options) all partitions on all disk connected to system. Therefore if you set the disk with chameleon installed as a primary boot disk, then it should load automatically and display selection menu.

 

There are some settings to com.apple.Boot.plist that may disable that menu. Please read the Chameleon manual for more info.

[mulcyber]

I have a windows 7 on one drive and 10.6.7 on another hard drive (not a partition of the same drive).

 

Is there a way I can edit some list like the boot.ini on windows 7 or com.apple.boot.plist ?

 

I am running Chameleon 2.0 rc4 on the osx drive. I installed windows 7 separate after getting osx running perfectly (the osx drive was disconnected while I did this).

 

Basically I am looking for a way to edit Chameleon to have an option to move the cursor to select windows, which I imagine is some sort of list that says disk0s2 and another option would be disk1s2.

 

If you are using Windows and Easybcd to boot Windows and Chameleon

from there, you can't change your com.apple.Boot.plist, it's fixed.

 

If you want to enable com.apple.Boot.plist, boot from from your second

drive directly into Chameleon. The choice between booting from drive0

(Windows) and drive1, SL, is made in Bios. The part which just shows

drives, and not the part which gives you boot preference order:

cdrom or usb stick. I mean the option select, which is harder to find.

 

If you are not having a problem booting into Chameleon, and you

just mean you want Windows to be the default,

 

"For default boot partition add this to com.apple.Boot.plist

 

<key>Default Partition</key>

<string>hd(x,y)</string>

 

whereas x is your hdd number and y is your partition number

(you will get this info in Disk Utility and in Terminal with: diskutil list)"

 

The problem with booting Windows from Chameleon is that there are

several reports (Gringo) that Windows will not come out of hibernation

correctly if it is not directly booted from drive0 (Windows drive).

 

I avoid this by using (on my system) the F12 key at startup which

lets me pick which drive I want to boot from. On my system, I then

use shutdown, not restart, to change from one OS to the other.

boot.ini worked for Windows XP.

[3.14r2]

"For default boot partition add this to com.apple.Boot.plist

 

<key>Default Partition</key>

<string>hd(x,y)</string>

 

whereas x is your hdd number and y is your partition number

(you will get this info in Disk Utility and in Terminal with: diskutil list)"

My 5ct. You can also use a disk/partition label (name of the disk) it will still be valid if something has changed in disk/partition structure (provided disk label hasn't changed). Like

<key>Default Partition</key>
<string>Win7</string>

...if it is not directly booted from drive0 (Windows drive).

Also it may do some damage when installing Service Pack if not booted directly.

[mulcyber]

I didn't know that about using the label method.

 

Some people have Win7 and SL on the same drive, and when they

try the SP1 upgrade to Win7 it fails with Chameleon in the MBR.

When I did my update from SL 10.6.6, on the second drive, I set the

Bios to boot the second drive as primary so it would always see Chameleon.

Better safe than sorry. How does one distinguish Pi from a truly random

number with resorting to AIT definition? ~ oracle

[Gringo Vermelho]

Also it may do some damage when installing Service Pack if not booted directly.

That's news to me, if you know more please share.

 

To the OP: You didn't say which revision of RC4 you are using - it might be too old to support booting by partition label as well as hiding and renaming partitions. However, setting the default boot partition works with all versions of RC4.

You should definitely upgrade though, 2.0 RC5 is a big improvement over RC4, especially on Vanilla Kernel capable hardware.

 

Hiding and renaming partitions can very useful with for example a standard installation of Windows 7, because Chameleon will show the "System Reserved" partition in the GUI along with your Windows Partition. If this bothers you, you will want to rename the "System Reserved" partition to "Windows" and hide the Windows partition itself - because Windows actually boots from the "System Reserved" partition. Chameleon will show unbootable NTFS and FAT32 data partitions which you might want to hide as well. In my experience it will not show HFS+ partitions that don't contain an OS X installation.

 

In the Chameleon general board over on VoodooProjects, you'll find docs (boothelp.txt) posted by Chameleon version number with the added features supported in each version highlighted in red.

I didn't know that about using the label method.

Me neither. Another one you might not know about is "Rename Partition". It is not documented in the docs thread because it is RC5 only (docs forthcoming!).

You can see the majority of switches and flags supported in the most recent version of Chameleon 2.0 RC5 here:

http://forge.voodooprojects.org/p/chameleo...86/boot2/boot.h

 

Here's an example from rom my own /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist:

	<key>Default Partition</key>
<string>hd(0,2)</string>
<key>Hide Partition</key>
<string>hd(1,2) hd(1,3)</string>
<key>Rename Partition</key>
<string>hd(1,1) Windows</string>

 

Note that the drive order used with hd(x,y) is the order as seen by Chameleon. Your physical drive/BIOS order and what you see in Disk Utility once OS X is running may not match. This might seem strange, I'll try to explain.

Looking at the example above, the physical order of my hard drives is actually different - my Windows HD is connected to SATA port 0 and boots by default, I don't use Chameleon to boot it. My OS X/Chameleon hard drive is connected to SATA port 1 - but as far as Chameleon is concerned, it is hd(0,x). It makes sense that Chameleon sees the drive it is running from as the first drive. Once you turn this thought over a few times. Or however that expression goes in English.

 

To have some idea, in the above example (note this is a GUID drive - not MBR) the default partition, hd(0,2) is my main OS X partition - hd(0,1) is the EFI partition. hd(1,2) is a Windows 7 installation on a separate drive and hd(1,3) is an NTFS data partition on that drive. And the renamed partition (1,1) is the "System Reserved" partition on that drive.

 

Hopefully I'm making sense.

 

Good Luck.

[3.14r2]

That's new to me, if you know more please share.

Well I have Win7 installed without a System Reserved partition (used Gparted to create a partition layout). SP1 requires for the above partition to be present or it will fail to install (now I know that therefore can't install it no matter what).

 

I have set OS X disk as boot disk (Windows is booted via Chameleon; both OS's are on separate drives).

On my first attempt SP installer took the EFI partition (Windows has HFS driver installed) for his own boot partition and did something to Chameleon (don't ask me how).

 

Therefore disconnect any other disk before installing SP and boot to Windows directly. Or something bad may happen.

 

Sorry for the OFFTOP.

[Gringo Vermelho]

Wait, what, you can't install SP1 at all because you have no System Reserved partition, even when the drive is your primary boot drive and the OS X drive is disconnected?

 

If so that's a major blunder on MS' part, there must be a bazillion PCs out there running Windows 7 with no System Reserved partition. I'm surprised there hasn't been a mega-flood of posts here about this.

 

I can't say that I'm surprised that SP1 will not install if your primary drive is not the Windows 7 drive tho'.

[mulcyber]

"The 100MB 'System Reserved' partition is only available for Windows 7 Ultimate,

Windows 7 Business and Windows 7 Enterprise editions."

 

The large majority of computers sold to the public come with Windows

7 Home Premium, which has no 100mb System Reserved partition.

Win7 will not create one either, with the SP1 upgrade.

 

Once it's created, I don't think you can delete System Reserved without

creating a problem. The correct way is to avoid having it created in

the first place, even with Win7 Ultimate and higher.

 

It's possible that SP1 could read the version of Windows and decide

that it should have a System Reserved partition for the update to

proceed. There are WinRecovery files and bootsec.bak in S.R. that

can be put on the main Win7 partition with Home ... it's hard to say

how smart the installer is. But this isn't going to impact jillions of

MS users because most of them have no System Reserved and only

a few delete System Reserved when they have the costlier versions.

 

So 3.14r2 could be right. But he didn't give it a chance. The

MBR of the drive which contained Chameleon should have been backed up.

 

The Windows drive should have had Windows reinstalled to the MBR, and

made primary boot/active. SP1 is certainly going to want to read that.

Or, as you say, the OS X drive could have been unhooked.

 

"On the other hand, if you once had a System Reserved partition on your Windows 7 installation but deleted it when or before installing Mac OS X on your system, the above will not work. In that case you will need to run the original Windows 7 installation as an upgrade and then run the Service Pack 1 installation after all other updates. You may need to reactivate and/or reinstall your third-party boot manager if setting the active partition back to the originally active partition does not work."

 

Mulcyber: I think this might work if it recreates System Reserved, even if it has been deleted, if there is still unallocated space for it. I think this "expert" may have been talking about both OS on 1 drive.

 

 

I responded to this post first because it didn't require the thinking that your other

post did, Gringo. Your thought expression in English prompted this memory.

The sun doesn't shine on the same burro's rear every day.

Your camel doesn't defecate dates every day. Pithy cross-cultural shared meanings.

[3.14r2]

Wait, what, you can't install SP1 at all because you have no System Reserved partition, even when the drive is your primary boot drive and the OS X drive is disconnected?

Yes! Unfortunately! More to say, then I've created the above partition on purpose (thinking it could possibly solve the problem) - it still had an error upon 90% of install. The error was different but, the result is the same - epic fail! So if System Reserved partition wasn't created initially, then most likely there is no chance to install SP1 (on my system at least).

 

The fact that many (most) people hadn't such an issue means that SP1 has been released not so long ago. Also many PC now comes with W7 preinstalled and some has System Reserved partition by definition. Moreover non of them probably came with a second OS preinstalled.

 

The same issue is "popular" amongst Ubuntu/Linux/Grub users. Just lurk "installation error: 0x800F0A12". So most likely a boot loader is to blame.

 

The topic has now officially gone off topic

[mulcyber]

That's news to me, if you know more please share.

 

Hiding and renaming partitions can very useful with for example a standard installation of Windows 7,

 

Me neither. Another one you might not know about is "Rename Partition". It is not documented in the docs thread because it is RC5 only (docs forthcoming!).

You can see the majority of switches and flags supported in the most recent version of Chameleon 2.0 RC5 here:

http://forge.voodooprojects.org/p/chameleo...86/boot2/boot.h

 

Note that the drive order used with hd(x,y) is the order as seen by Chameleon. Your physical drive/BIOS order and what you see in Disk Utility once OS X is running may not match. This might seem strange, I'll try to explain.

It makes sense that Chameleon sees the drive it is running from as the first drive. Once you turn this thought over a few times. Or however that expression goes in English.

 

mull over: deliberate on, turn something over in your mind

 

I mulled over your post and also slept on it. Perhaps Windows works

similarly to Chameleon. I have WinXP on one partition and Win7 on

the other partition of my first drive. Whichever partition I boot to, is

always the C: drive and the other drive changes to the D: drive.

 

"because Windows actually boots from the "System Reserved" partition."

I'm going to do an experiment with this and report back.

 

I had a couple of fat32 formatted partitions on my second drive.

They displayed on the SL Desktop as "Untitled" and "Untitled 1".

Sometimes I've been able to edit info in Finder and change the label.

But other times, the option to rename the partition is not available

and I have to rename the partitions under Windows Disk Management.

Reading, I think this depends on whether the partition is NTFS or fat32.

Now SL reads the label somehow also and changes the untitleds to

real names. It makes me think that the Windows drive must be read

by SL in order to discover the label/name change.

So, that means I think that Rename Partition must be only cosmetic

because the alternative means OS X renaming Windows partitions?

 

Thanks for the link to the new documentation.

[Gringo Vermelho]

Yes, "Rename Partition" is purely cosmetic and only affects what you see in the Chameleon GUI. It doesn't do anything to your actual drive and/or partition labels.

 

Thanks for the link to the new documentation.

 

It's the Chameleon source code. If you know how to read it, it's the best documentation there is.

 

Thanks for the English lesson. I remember that expression, it's rarely used I think.

[ghostdog 5.0]

I just reinstalled Chameleon from the Iatkos disc installer and now I can see the windows installation when I press a key at boot. You just need to make sure that now your hard drive is identified the same (disk0s2 now became disk1s2). I did not install Chameleon to the windows drive, it was reinstalled again to the mac drive.

 

Now it is working how it should.

[mulcyber]

The fact that many (most) people hadn't such an issue means that SP1 has been released not so long ago. Also many PC now comes with W7 preinstalled and some has System Reserved partition by definition. Moreover non of them probably came with a second OS preinstalled.

 

 

The topic has now officially gone off topic

 

Most of the public has Windows 7 Home Premium because Dell, HP,

etc. put that version on the computers they sell.

None of those people have a System Reserved partition.

SP1 is going to work for nearly all of them.

If they have a second drive OS, OS X or Linux or even both as I have,

and Chameleon is installed to the MBR, or Grub, or Cham to the MBR

and Grub to the Linux root partition,

SP1 is going to work for nearly all of them.

 

That's because what is installed on the second drive has nothing to

do with whether or not the SP1 upgrade goes through.

Because the second drive can be unhooked, the Windows drive can

be made active and the MBR of the Windows MBR restored so that

Windows is directly bootable. Then, SP1 is going to work for nearly all of them.

 

I say nearly, because there are other issues which could impact the

SP1 upgrade, power outage, memory failing under stress, bad sectors.

 

System Reserved is never a problem for Windows 7 Home Premium

since it is never created in the first place, no user intervention is

required. Unhook the non-Windows drive, install Windows to the

Windows drive MBR, so that it can boot directly, it needs to be active.

 

Likewise, with Windows 7 Ultimate, with System Reserved intact,

SP1 will go through using the guidelines in the paragraph above.

 

The situation is more complicated with both OS on one drive.

It will probably still work, using the same guidelines.

I'm not sure about after deleting System Reserved with Ultimate/+

 

This forum is for Multi-booting and more than half of these systems

dual-boot Windows 7. And you are not the first to post about the

Win7 SP1 upgrade on this forum. Beside ghostdog dual boots on two

drives with Windows 7, so this information about how to upgrade to

SP1 could easily be quite relevant to him.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

 

"The conventional MBR code from PC DOS and MS-DOS, and widely used elsewhere, expects the fdisk partition table scheme to be in use, and scans the list of partitions in the MBR's embedded partition table to find the only one that is marked with the active flag. It then loads and runs the volume boot record (VBR) of the active partition."

 

 

0x800fa12

When clicking on the Go online link Microsoft mentions the several reasons that could lead to this error.

1. "The system partition isn’t automatically mounted, or made accessible to Windows, during startup."

 

"expects the fdisk partition table scheme to be in use, and scans the list of partitions in the MBR's embedded partition table to find the only one that is marked with the active flag."

 

That's why SP1 needs a Windows owned MBR and to be marked active.

Always backup MBRs.

[3.14r2]

Now it is working how it should.

I'm glad that you've the problem solved.

System Reserved is never a problem for Windows 7 Home Premium

since it is never created in the first place, no user intervention is

required. Unhook the non-Windows drive, install Windows to the

Windows drive MBR, so that it can boot directly, it needs to be active.

I have had done few Windows 7 HP (both 32&64) installations on different notebooks (clean install from a retail disk) recently. In both cases installer HAS created Sys.Part..

 

Windows 7 installed on my desktop (it is the system I'm talk' about in this topic) is 64-bit Pro version. It can be booted by itself (it was able to from the very moment it was installed) those is active by definition. Also I did prevented Windows installer from creating Sys.Part. by creating partitions needed prior to installing Windows (so an already created partition was selected for C drive). Therefore Sys.Part. wasn't deleted - it has never existed.

 

I did a proper google'ing sessions on the "SP1 failure to install" subject. And non of the solutions (either by MS or other sources) proposed did help. No matter how Windows is booted (on it's own or via Cham, with or without OS X disk connected) SP fails to install.

 

Based on the above I suspect Pro version can only be updated with Sys.Part. present.

 

Unfortunately it is a production machine and can't be reinstalled any time. I guess eventually I'll do a clean reinstall from DVD with SP integrated.

[mulcyber]

Unfortunately it is a production machine and can't be reinstalled any time. I guess eventually I'll do a clean reinstall from DVD with SP integrated.

 

I suspect that might work out well. My Windows drive has WinXP on

it and Win7 put some of its boot files on the WinXP partition. I can

see how Win7 might have written some boot files to your second

drive if it were hooked up. Next is the root of WinXP.

E:\>attrib -a

Not resetting hidden file - E:\Boot.BAK

Not resetting hidden file - E:\boot.ini

Not resetting hidden file - E:\bootmgr

Not resetting hidden file - E:\BOOTSECT.BAK

Not resetting hidden file - E:\IO.SYS

Not resetting hidden file - E:\MCEZY

Not resetting hidden file - E:\MSDOS.SYS

Not resetting hidden file - E:\NTDETECT.COM

Not resetting hidden file - E:\ntldr

Not resetting hidden file - E:\pagefile.sys

Not resetting hidden file - E:\win7.ld

 

And you see some Win7 files on it. I have Windows 7 Ultimate with

no System Reserved and with SP1 installed. That's why I've been

dubious about some of your remarks. Since seeing is believing, here

are two shots with no System Reserved in them, and one with SP1.

D: is missing because it's the usb stick I used to take the Gparted capture.

Two of the ?gb partitions on the end are linux and linux swap.

diskutil list, on SL, shows the same partitions as Gparted. No S.R. in Cham.