The dreaded boot0 error, with a twist

[atsakir]

Hi everyone,

 

I am faced with the (almost classic) boot0:GPT boot0:error problem but my case is somewhat more complicated. You see, the problem appears on a former dual boot Win7/ OSX machine with both OSs on the same physical volume.

 

When I say former, I mean that for some time I had it dual boot through Chameleon, but at some point I decided to ditch the OSX partition and return the free space to the boot partition of Windows using GParted. All was working well for about a year or so, until about 2 months ago, when all of a sudden I was faced with the boot0:GPT boot0:error message.

 

After searching through the forums most solutions, including the boot1h file solution, assume that there was still an OSX installation present on the disk whereas in my case there isn't one anymore. For all intents and purposes, this is now a single boot machine with only Windows on it. In any case, I used Universal Boot CD which contains a Linux distro with various tools to fix and restore disk issues. In particular, I used the TestDisk tool to try and locate and recover the missing Windows boot partition. This was unsuccessful even after a detailed scan, so I gave up, formatted the boot partition and re-installed Win7 64 from scratch and the problem seemed fixed.

 

That was until yesterday when the same error appeared again. The entire drive space appears unallocated in GParted where there should be 3 partitions C, D and E.

 

Can anyone propose a solution that will permanently fix the problem (i.e. completely remove any traces of an OSX bootloader) because I don't think re-installing windows all over again will fix the problem once and for all.

[WaldMeister]

Hi,

 

Could how was the dual boot set-up?

Did you install Windows and OS X on 1 HDD, or where they on separated HDD's?

 

If you have 2 HDD's, it could be that somehow the wrong HDD boot partition is loaded at times, just my guess.

[Mac Boy]

To wipe the entire disk clean you can type dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx but this will take a very long time, and is not necessary.

 

Instead, wipe just the first MB of each partition like so: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx1 count=2048 (repeat for sdx2 ... etc).

 

Then use gdisk to wipe all traces of the GPT and MBR: gdisk -Z /dev/sdx (Run this command twice.)

 

Now your disk is clean, unformatted, and un-partitioned so you can install any OS you want.