The Official Dual Booting Thread

[DrJägermeister]

Why do you people want to dual boot anyway? All I do is hit F8 when my computer finishes it's POST, (to get to my "select boot device" option. (Yes I know that not everybodys mobo has this feature so don't flame me!))and then pick the drive I want to boot from eg. my Windows drive, or my OSx86 drive. No messy dual boot promblems at all! Just my two cents......

Try this with a notebook

[Jeezoflip]

can someone please help me? I have 2 hard drives...and OsX is on one of them, and windows is on the other. Windows is the primary drive, and i want to be able to have a boot loader in the beginning to choose either one.

[capper308]

Good Point DrJägermeister!

 

I don't have(or use) a notebook. but I imagine that you just don't slap in another hard drive and install your favorite OS....

 

Has anybody tried Acronis OS selector? I have used it to dual boot my Win/linux machine before with great success.

 

 

Just a thought.

[DerAlSem]

I've tried it... Version 10, and it seems, that it has no support for MacOSX... Because it's _very_ buggy. Every third reboot i have to use emergency CD to boot from, then repair OS Selector, and then boot...

It's a pity... has anyone else tried it?

[jbjonas]

I'm using Acronis OS selector (version 9) and I have had absolutely no problems with it. It seems to recognize the Mac install just fine, and boot to it. However, I do have my Mac install on it's own dedicated Hard Drive... I don't know if that makes any difference.

[DerAlSem]

I have three SATA drives. Two 300 Gb - for archives, and one 80 with two primary partition. 1st - 10 Gb XP and 2nd 10 Gb - OSX... And it's continues to hangs... ;-(

But what i see - you have mac on IDE hdd... May be i should try such configuration...

[jbjonas]

Yeah, I find it easier to have my MacOS on a separate logical disk from my XP, etc. It makes a lot of things easier. I don't have to worry about either OS screwing up the MBR set by the other OS. Also, when installing, it means I can use the 10.4.3 disk utility to set up the partitions on that drive, without it messing up other non HFS+ partitions (since they are all HFS+) Also, with OS X specifically, it is much easier to have a dedicated drive, because it can be picky about where it will boot from (like inside extended partitions, or if there are many other partitions on the drive). Let us know how Acronis 10 works for you if you go this route... I wonder if for some reason Acronis 9 works better with OS X. (if so, I might be able to direct you to a copy of the older version)

[DerAlSem]

I don't have an empty IDE HD, but i'll have one till the end of week... So i'll write a report... ;-)

[amphora]

I'm using the default Darwin loader. And it works perfectly. Only one question: My first partition is XP and second is OSX. OSX boots as default but I want XP to boot default. How can I accomplish this?

[DerAlSem]

I've attached 4th SATA drive.

 

Here's my new configuration:

 

80 Gb SATA - Win XP. NTFS

160 GB SATA - OSX Intel, HFS

300 GB SATA - some files, HFS

300 GB SATA - some more files, HFS

 

And two NEC drives on IDE (dvd-rom, dvd-rw).

 

Works perfectly. ;-)

Dual boot with default windows. And i can even swith between systems remotely, using Acronis.

[qarias]

I'm using the default Darwin loader. And it works perfectly. Only one question: My first partition is XP and second is OSX. OSX boots as default but I want XP to boot default. How can I accomplish this?

 

Set your xp drive "active". To do this use spfdisk.

Your xp install will boot by default. oh, and......search......

[Phil H]

This beign the official dual booting forum, I thought id ask here. Ive searched through the forums, wiki and google to no avail. Maybe im alone on this problem but hopefully you guys could figure it out.

 

I have a 3.4ghz dual core P4 Media center, with a clean install of MCE, which, because of HP being cheap, is 2 partitions, a 1 gig fat32 recovery partition, and a 230gig NTFS containing XP. I then partitioned a 12gig chunkout of the XP chunk for osx. I downloaded the 10.4.3 iso with weseleys patch. Apparently i didnt format the 12 gig chunk correctly, but the osx installer let me reformat and the install went clean from there.

 

UNTIL... I restarted the machine. This being my first dual boot and being excited I forgot to install a bootloader, so it booted to a blinking underscore, until i turn it off. My friend sent me acronis, a boot loader, after which installing I can boot perfect into osx, but that blinking underscore is all that would come up until i turned it off. I have tried repairing it with a winxp pro cd, pretty much everything i could find online short of fixMBR, which i dont know much about, but has a scary warning lol.

 

Does anyone have any ideas where to go from here? Thank for your help!

[funben]

Here is my experience that other could benefit.

I followed the instruction from Pulsedriver81 on TPB to install macOSx

 

I used partition magic to have some spare disk space to install mac osx.

the spare space created was before the windows partition so when I installed mac osx from a DVD, it created the partition and the windows "drive letter" changed, so I wasn't able to start windows (I had the unable to location hal.dll)

 

to fix this, I used a linux live CD to remove the mac os partition, and I could start windows again.

then I used partition magic to move the empty space AFTER the windows partition.

Finally I reinstalled mac osX. (It's not quite working yet but dual booting is OK)

[Manticus]

I'm dual-booting 10.4.5 and XP on my HP dv1340us laptop. Most of the processes I've read so far have seemed pretty complicated, so here's what I did.

 

Boot from 10.4.5 DVD

Open "Disk Utility" from the installer, select the drive and divide it into 2 partitions

Format the first as Mac filesystem of choice and the second as MS-DOS

Quit "Disk Utility" and go back to the installer

Install MacOS and setup as normal

 

Boot from XP install CD

Format the MS-DOS partition as NTFS and install XP as normal

This will make the XP partition the active partition and you will be unable to boot into MacOS

 

From here, we need to make the MacOS partition active. To do that, boot from a linux Live-CD (I used Unbuntu 5.10)

Open a terminal

As root, run fdisk on /dev/hda (fdisk is pretty easy to use it you read the prompts)

Toggle the bootable flag off for the NTFS partition

Toggle the bootable flag on for the MacOS partition

Write the partition table and exit

Reboot

 

When the machine comes back up, the Darwin bootloader will automagically list MacOS and Windows NTFS to select from.

 

Woohoo! Easy dual-booting!

 

Have fun!

[Forsakken]

I have 10.4.5 installed from the patched DVD and I can't get the chain0 method or Acronis OS Selector 10 to work.

 

I have several NTFS partitions and one AF type partition on the same HD. OSX is installed on the proper primary partition and I can't boot into it no matter what I try. I've booted from the DVD and set the proper boot volume and I've even tried booting with DVD > hit F8 > manually enter rd=disk0s3 to boot the OSX86 and as soon as the process starts a message comes up telling me to reboot the system. This happens every time I use this method.

 

Going to try installing OSX86 first and XP after to see if the Darwin loader will handle OSX and Windows properly.

[TheGreatDeceiver]

I have 10.4.5 installed from the patched DVD and I can't get the chain0 method or Acronis OS Selector 10 to work.

 

I have several NTFS partitions and one AF type partition on the same HD. OSX is installed on the proper primary partition and I can't boot into it no matter what I try. I've booted from the DVD and set the proper boot volume and I've even tried booting with DVD > hit F8 > manually enter rd=disk0s3 to boot the OSX86 and as soon as the process starts a message comes up telling me to reboot the system. This happens every time I use this method.

 

Going to try installing OSX86 first and XP after to see if the Darwin loader will handle OSX and Windows properly.

 

I have followed this guide and had luck. I heard that the chain0 from more recent builds have problems. If you create your own chain0 file according to the link it should work. My Vista bootloader picks it up too.

[fullmtlblanket]

Hey, I am in OSX and I can't get into my Windows installation. Is there any way that I can set up dual booting from within OSX?

[apolloae]

Hello all,

 

I am trying to keep Windows installed on my computer and at the same time create a partition with OSX working. (I will work out the kinks with dual booting later) I was redirected here to get advice on what I should do when the OSX installation does not recognize any destination volumes for install.

 

My old topic is here, but I will provide a basic outline of my problem...

 

I'm using the 10.4.3 installer, and when I get to the point to choose where to install it to (the destination volume) there are no options. I looked in another tutorial and it said to set one of the partitions to journaling mode, which didn't make much sense to me and I was later told that that just slows OSX down quite a bit. I am wondering how to get the installer to recognize that I do, in fact, places I can install it...

 

I was also told to format the partition that I set aside to install OSX on, however when I click to format it, the Disk Utility says that it will format all three partitions of the HDD, which I do not want to do because I would like to keep all of my Windows files intact. If you guys know the way around all this, please share.

 

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

[fullmtlblanket]

Hello all,

 

I am trying to keep Windows installed on my computer and at the same time create a partition with OSX working. (I will work out the kinks with dual booting later) I was redirected here to get advice on what I should do when the OSX installation does not recognize any destination volumes for install.

 

My old topic is here, but I will provide a basic outline of my problem...

 

I'm using the 10.4.3 installer, and when I get to the point to choose where to install it to (the destination volume) there are no options. I looked in another tutorial and it said to set one of the partitions to journaling mode, which didn't make much sense to me and I was later told that that just slows OSX down quite a bit. I am wondering how to get the installer to recognize that I do, in fact, places I can install it...

 

I was also told to format the partition that I set aside to install OSX on, however when I click to format it, the Disk Utility says that it will format all three partitions of the HDD, which I do not want to do because I would like to keep all of my Windows files intact. If you guys know the way around all this, please share.

 

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

 

I had this problem. I had to click erase in the disk utility rather than the more obvious choice... I think that's how it went.

[apolloae]

I had this problem. I had to click erase in the disk utility rather than the more obvious choice... I think that's how it went.

And this will erase ONLY the partition?

 

EDIT: Excellent! This worked!

 

Thanks a lot for the help fullmtlblanket!

[fullmtlblanket]

And this will erase ONLY the partition?

 

 

Oddly enough it did. Just be careful what you press though. there's choices that you can make under the erase option. So make the right choices! (I don't know how to word this correctly)

 

Awesome! I am so glad to have helped. Now if somebody can teach me how to dual boot @_@

[funben]

followed some instruction found on TPB.

1 - used partiotion magic to make some unallocated partition in my disk. make sure this space is after the windows boot partition

2 - used diskpart in cmd mode to create a partition type=af

3 - boot with the DVD

4 - format the partition using the "erase" function

5 - install (this install the mac os boot lood that works fine to load mac os, windows, and anything else)

[Franzy]

Hey wutup. I tri-booted Windows XP, Mac OS X Tiger (V. 10.4.1), and Windows Vista Beta 2 Build 5308. It was a crazy experiment. With Xp already installed, I first dd'ed the img file to the mac partition, then ran the windows vista Beta 2 setup. I used chain0 to establish Mac os X in the Windows Boot menu. Now, when i startup, I get the Windows Vista boot menu anyways, with all the options of my Windows XP boot menu. Worked really well until i accidentally hibernated my machine and vista stopped working. It was good while it lasted and i thought i would let those know that tri-booting these operating systems is stable as long as you don't hibernate and mess up Vista's boot sequence.

 

I actually have a problem of my own by the way: i installed the Mac os x 10.4.4 w/ 10.4.5 patch and installation went perfectly fine but i tried using the chain0 file but when i select it it just says, chain0 boot error. No idea wtf is going on. I'm gonna test it out on another machine. Please, Please help if you have any suggestions.

[apolloae]

Alrighty, I'm back to this thread to seek advice. I'm wondering how to dual boot if you:

 

A.) Already have Windows installed

B.) have already installed OSX (up and working) and

C.) Can't change it using the ideas put forth in this guide...

 

Any help is great.

 

EDIT: I have seen a lot on spfdisk and I have tried it use this, however I cannot get it to work; for some reason my computer will run the program when I put it on a formatted disk. Do you put it in the floppy then run the exe, or do you put it in the floppy and that's all? Is there any special thing you have to do to the file to get it to work on startup?

 

EDIT2: I have gotten fdisk to work, however I try to boot the partition with WindowsXP on it and it says it cannot find the operating system, even though I have not erased, formatted, etc the partition with XP on it, plus in OSX it can view all the files in that partition! Anyone know what's up?

 

EDIT3: It's a novel! Alright, well I used someone's advice to try using a Windows ME disk and using the fdisk off of that to load fdisk and get the bootloader working, or at least get into Windows. Unfortunately I typed in /fdisk hbr and now neither of my operating systems are working. Somehow I got OSX to start up again but then I installed two programs and was forced to restard the computer and now I both operating systems on both partitions give me an error that says "Missing Operating System". If you guys know a way to fix this, or at least a way to get my files off and onto an external harddrive so I can reformat, please share.

 

Thanks again.

[fgdn17]

If you're dual booting or triple booting OS X with Windows and/or Linux, let us know in this thread how you did it! Once the Intel Macs come out, a lot of people will be wanting to know how to dual boot OS X. For more Dual Boot guides, check out our wiki.

 

Share your experience here.

 

triple booting wxpsp2/mac osx-86 10.4.5/ms vista 5342...all working fine...

 

celeron 2.8gh, 768M memory, ASUS P4GE-MX motherboard..ATI RADEON 9000

AGP Video card....issues are minor and solved in these and other forums...just need to

go find them when it affects what I'm trying to do...used standard wxp dual-boot(boot.ini) which

is modified by vista(bootmgr), used chain0 in boot.ini for MAC OSX....................FWIW