Lazy man guide to Mac OSX86 co-habitation with Windows ;)

[stangri]

I hope this saves time to someone like me -- who wants to keep their primary system -- Windows but also have an option of booting into MacOS every now and then... I just wish I knew what I'm going to cover below before I jumped into the blue

 

So I've started with the HDD in my laptop which was split into two logical drives (partitions) -- SYSTEM (20Gb with Windows) and DATA (55Gb with my documents & other stuff I'd like to keep safe between Windows reinstalls). I've also had a spare USB drive (actually was my main drive before I switched to 7200rpm one -- if you didn't know you can buy the USB cable/case for your 2.5" HDD at eBay for like 10 bucks) which was a great help and of course the Maxxuss patched Mac OSX x86 10.4.3 and the Hiren's Boot CD 7.2.

 

I hoped that if I just created the third logical disk, I could use it to install the Mac OSX. Well, I couldn't. Whatever I did in the MacOS DVD disk utility I couldn't force it to convert/format the third partition into MacOS filesystem without repartitioning the whole disk. So thanks to Norton Ghost (Hiren's Boot CD: 2-2-3) I was able to back up both my Windows and my Data to the USB HDD and then let the Mac OSX wipe out my HDD to repartition it -- so If you want to install Mac OSX you better be able to backup the contents of your Hard Drive! I believe there could be a way to format the third partition into a Mac OS partition with some third-party tools, if anyone is willing to share how to do it I'll gladly link this info here.

 

After my disk was repartitioned by Mac OSX disk utility I restored both my Windows and my DATA partitions into two NTFS partitions and made sure I can still boot into Windows. After that I just booted again from the 10.4.3 DVD and installed the Mac OSX on my third partition.

 

As expected the Mac OSX installer made my third partition active so now I would boot into the Mac OSX by default. However if during the first seconds of Darwin boot I pressed F8 I could get into the menu which would list all 3 of my partitions giving me the option to boot into any of them. So no third-party bootloader is needed if you just need to dual-boot between Windows (2k, XP, 2k3 I presume) and Mac OSX -- just the ntloader and darwin loader.

 

If you are happy with the Darwin Bootloader as your main bootloader and would like to have an option of booting into Windows from it, make sure that you edit your /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.boot.plist file to be:

(in case you don't know how to edit the file: sudo -s and then pico /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.boot.plist -- edit the file then press Ctrl-X to save/exit)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="1.0">

<dict>

<key>Kernel</key>

<string>mach_kernel</string>

<key>Kernel Flags</key>

<string></string>

<key>Boot Graphics</key>

<string>Yes</string>

<key>Quiet Boot</key>

<string>No</string>

<key>Timeout</key>

<string>10</string>

</dict>

</plist>

Thanks to Macgirl for the tips on the last two keys in this file. This will give you 10 seconds before booting into Mac OSX to press up/down arrow in the keyboard to select the partition you want to boot from.

 

But since I wanted to keep my primary OS -- Windows I wanted to make sure I can boot into OSX from the Windows bootloader, so I made my Windows partition Active (with the Special FDisk I believe -- Hiren's Boot CD options 1-6) and booted into it.

 

So if you want to be able to boot into the Mac OSX from the Windows bootloader -- you need to download the file chain0 and put it into the main (root) folder of your C disk. Then right-click on “My Computer” and select the “Advanced” tab. Under “Startup and Recover” click the “Settings” button. You will then need to click the “Edit” button -- Windows will open the boot.ini file in Notepad. Add the this line at the end:

C:\chain0="Mac OSX x86 10.4.3"

 

This should let you boot into your Mac OSX partition. For me it would still jump to Windows -- so when I get to the Darwin Boot, I don't let it load, but rather select (down key) the Mac OSX partition from the Darwin boot menu and it will load fine then.

 

Post away if you have anything to add or if you have any questions.

[schippermaarten]

Have you tried running partitionmagic afterwards? On m configuration it have an error: Error #117: Partition’s drive letter cannot be identified

 

any help?

[stangri]

Don't have any error numbers but I do remember partition magic 8 (or whatever it is on Hiren's CD) not being able to display the partition information correctly after the disk has been partitioned with Mac OSX's disk utility.

 

Norton Ghost works tho, even on the MacOS partition although Ghost cannot identify which space is used on it so when I ghosted the MacOS partition it took an image of the whole partition instead of just used space (like it does for NTFS).

 

I'm sorry I can't be of any further help.