Purple Puppy Posted March 13, 2007 Share Posted March 13, 2007 (edited) Recently, I reinstalled Mac OS X, and couldn't boot to Vista or XP. However, the full details is a long story... here goes (please read) Before installing Mac OS X, I had Windows XP and Windows Vista installed on D:\ and C:\ respectively. In the Windows Vista boot loader, there were three choices: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Vista. Only the second choice (Vista) worked. Therefore, I could only boot to Vista, and I couldn't boot to XP, despite it being installed. Acronis OS Selector was installed initially, but I uninstalled it accidentally. As a consequence, something strange happened to my Windows Vista Bootloader, and now I couldn't boot to anything at all. Therefore, being unable to boot, I decided to install Mac OS X. I just happened to have an empty 30GB Partition, so I installed it there. Now, I'm running on OS X happily and perfectly, and got everything to work just fine. I set the Darwin bootloader to timeout at 30 seconds. However, when I select C:\, the Windows Vista bootloader appeared, and told me that winload.exe was not found or was corrupted. Upon booting into Mac OS X, however, I found that winload.exe was there and was probably not corrupted. When I use the Windows Vista bootloader to select XP, or the 2nd Vista, neither worked, as was expected initially. When I select D:\, there was no bootloader, and instead it just said "ntldr not found". When I copied ntldr from C:\ to D:\, (I had NTFS-3G installed, so I can write to NTFS), and then tried booting to D:\, it simply went back to the Darwin bootloader again. Now, I am considering deleting the Windows Vista bootloader altogehter, and just use the Windows XP boot.ini. Like this, if I use the Darwin bootloader to boot to C:\, the XP bootloader would appear, and I will be able to boot to XP and/or Vista. However, how do I do that, and would it work? I have asked many people but I realised that I never provide enough information to let them know what I'm talking about. Please take time to read through this post since I'm really desperate to run Vista (despite the glaring fact that OS X is much better, all my games are on Vista). Extra info: My XP was Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, my Vista was Windows Vista Home Premium Edition 32 bit (build 6000), my OS X is JaS 10.4.8 with Semthex's kernel, and the Natit/Titan (forgot which was which) graphics card driver. My hardware is Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz desktop processor 2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM (2 x 1GB DIMM) NVidia Geforce 7900GS 256mb 300GB Seagate Barracuda (3 partitions, C:\ (vista) 148gb, D:\ (xp) 120gb, F:\ (osx) 30gb Asrock Conroe 945G-DVi If you need any more information, please tell me! And please don't spam the thread! Edited March 13, 2007 by Purple Puppy Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/45103-cannot-boot-to-vista-or-xp/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Wang Posted March 13, 2007 Share Posted March 13, 2007 Please refer to the below thread to solve winload.exe problem: http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=39253 Bruce Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/45103-cannot-boot-to-vista-or-xp/#findComment-322392 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Purple Puppy Posted March 13, 2007 Author Share Posted March 13, 2007 However, I don't have the Vista disc (I installed it from ISO)! And, my Mac OS X does not support the burning function of my DVD drive, so I cannot burn it. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/45103-cannot-boot-to-vista-or-xp/#findComment-323038 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Purple Puppy Posted March 15, 2007 Author Share Posted March 15, 2007 Today, when I turned on my computer, to my dismay, neither the XP or the Vista partition showed up in Finder. When I opened disk utility, it stuck at "analysing disk" and froze. Sensing trouble, I tried to do a backup, but when copying to an external hdd, finder froze. In the end, I turned my computer off and tried to reboot. However, now, it can't boot, saying that the primary disk has an error, and won't do anything else. Does that mean that my harddisk is dead for good? If I get the OS X JaS 10.4.8 disk, will it fix itself? Specs are the same as always. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/45103-cannot-boot-to-vista-or-xp/#findComment-324088 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Wang Posted March 15, 2007 Share Posted March 15, 2007 You can try the below to see if it can be fixed: Boot from OS X DVD, open Disk Utility from TOOLS and verify your OS X partition. Or if it's MRB error, below might hopefully help: Boot from OS X DVD, open Terminal from TOOLS and type below comands: fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0 (0=the first HDD, 1=the 2nd HDD) falg x (x=the partition number you want to set ACTIVE) update write quit Then reboot to see if it works. Good luck! Bruce Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/45103-cannot-boot-to-vista-or-xp/#findComment-324126 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Purple Puppy Posted March 16, 2007 Author Share Posted March 16, 2007 I just deleted XP and Vista (by erasing the disk)... good thing I did something of a backup a few days ago. I feel that I never shall use windows again! Why the Vista and XP partitions unmounted themselves still baffles me. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/45103-cannot-boot-to-vista-or-xp/#findComment-324810 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts