CAUTION! OSX's "Startup Disk" PrefPane crashed it all!!!

[JoeP]

i had managed to run everything fine except Wifi (Atheros), with dual boot (win/mac), perfect 1280x800 display, sound and so on.

 

I only had one little point: i needed to press F8 very quickly after choosing OSX in Windows' dual boot menu, which wasn't very nice... so i tried several things.

 

DO NOT USE "STARTUP DISK" located in the System Preferences: now, my computer won't boot up, the bios stops with message "invalid partition table"

 

i've tried modifying the partition table using WinXP install disc and using fdisk on a Linux LiveCD, nothing works. i don't have a floppy drive so i cannot use tools like partition magic rescue disk.

 

does anybody have any idea??

thanx in advance :'( :'( :'(

[thrunner]

Try booting to winxp console and run MBRFIX and set WinXP partition to active and unhide (sometimes OSX does hiding of WinXP, I wonder why? when you hide a WinXP partition, it won't boot anymore )

Also try BartPE type of boot CD which is easier to do. Many implementations has MBRFIX included plus other partition tools.

http://www.anwald.com/

 

After that you should be able to boot to WinXP and repair your partition table with something like Testdisk:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html

 

For OS boot up selection, try Acronis OS boot selector that comes with Acronis Disk Director Suite. Works well with any of the OSX version so far.

[jordanvanbergen]

i had managed to run everything fine except Wifi (Atheros), with dual boot (win/mac), perfect 1280x800 display, sound and so on.

 

I only had one little point: i needed to press F8 very quickly after choosing OSX in Windows' dual boot menu, which wasn't very nice... so i tried several things.

 

DO NOT USE "STARTUP DISK" located in the System Preferences: now, my computer won't boot up, the bios stops with message "invalid partition table"

 

i've tried modifying the partition table using WinXP install disc and using fdisk on a Linux LiveCD, nothing works. i don't have a floppy drive so i cannot use tools like partition magic rescue disk.

 

does anybody have any idea??

thanx in advance :'( :'( :'(

 

I had the same ones. So indeed you are right, NEVER USE THE "STARTUP DISK" function in System Preferences if you have your MAC OSX x86 on the same disk on another partition. I was able to fix the boot problems by setting the master boot record to active for the Windows partition using a small utility MBR Fix. Don't know where I downloaded it but I put this on a WinPE bootable cd I downloaded somewhere......

 

It took me 8 hours to get to this point, so I know you are frustrated like hell. I even tried reinstalling windows XP over my "not bootable" version but it didn't fix the problem. I had to set the MBR myself to make it function again.

 

Regards and good luck

 

Jordan van Bergen

[JoeP]

i fixed it all using Linux (Gentoo LiveCD) fdisk. I tried with windows' FIXMBR and FIXBOOT commands, and many other things. Finally, what worked was fdisk under linux, and i just needed to set the bootable flag on partition 1 (windows):

 

fdisk /dev/hda

fdisk> a

Partition? [1-6]: 1

fdisk> w

[code]

 

 

[EDIT]

 

MacOS X doesn't work yet... it says NTLDR MISSING. gotta check a few things again...

 

[EDIT]

 

Finally I reinstalled OSX after checking that the partition table was correct. I used VMWare to install (i think i could have installed natively) and chose "Archive & install" option so that i kept the few documents i had created. So, no data loss, only time loss. Kewl!

[os_overload]

i actually did this by mistake and couldn't unselect it, but when I rebooted, my partitions were all fine except now I can't boot MacOSX from GRUB like I could before, only from the chain0 bootloader file.

 

NOTE- careful, if winxp recovery disk doesnt detect windows/ask for your admin password and you use fixmbr, you'll erase your partition table. I did that once. It was fun!