Cyman Posted June 6, 2007 Share Posted June 6, 2007 Hi everyone. I bought a new HDD yesterday. I am a MBP C2D user and installed the new 500GB HDD via an eSATA connection. I formatted it into four partitions with Disk Utility. I created two HFS+ partitions and two free space partitions which I want to format in NTFS/install Vista on one of them. Additionally, the new HDD was created under the GPT scheme. Now the hassle begins. I was researching on Google if Vista supports GPT disks/booting and fell over several articles/FAQs and so on. Unfortunately the information seems to be contradictory. One article says it does support GPT booting, the other says only if EFI is present and another page says it doesn't support it. I installed rEFIt on a flash drive and wanted to see what happens when booting with the Vista DVD inserted. So I started the Vista installation routine and there it doesn't see my eSATA drive (the ExpressCard doesn't seem to support booting) and it says the disk is a GPT disk which Vista doesn't support and thus can not be installed! The next thing I am going to try is installing Vista via BootCamp, although I wanted to circumvent this. Will it be possible to clone my Macintosh HD including BootCamp and Vista to the new HDD afterwards so Vista is still useable/bootable? Here are some of the links with the information about XP/Vista and GPT I found and I am referring to: Microsoft FAQ Web article Pleas help me understand what is going on. What is false, what is fact? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christoph Pfisterer Posted June 10, 2007 Share Posted June 10, 2007 Hi Cyman, Have a look at my article "Windows Vista and EFI" at http://refit.sourceforge.net/info/vista.html. Also GPT is not the same as EFI. http://refit.sourceforge.net/myths/ may get you a better idea of what each is for. Installing Vista on that GPT-formatted drive might be possible if you convert that drive to a hybrid MBR/GPT format like the one commonly used in Boot Camp installations. Note that if you're unlucky Vista will still detect the GPT part of the hybrid and refuse to install. I never tried it, and personally I would never install Windows on an external drive anyway. -chrisp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Superhai Posted June 11, 2007 Share Posted June 11, 2007 It is no problem to install on a GPT disc for x64 vista or xp, they have support builtin. But booting is the problem as the support is incomplete. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cyman Posted June 21, 2007 Author Share Posted June 21, 2007 Hi Cyman, Have a look at my article "Windows Vista and EFI" at http://refit.sourceforge.net/info/vista.html. Also GPT is not the same as EFI. http://refit.sourceforge.net/myths/ may get you a better idea of what each is for. Installing Vista on that GPT-formatted drive might be possible if you convert that drive to a hybrid MBR/GPT format like the one commonly used in Boot Camp installations. Note that if you're unlucky Vista will still detect the GPT part of the hybrid and refuse to install. I never tried it, and personally I would never install Windows on an external drive anyway. -chrisp Hello. First of all I really appreciate rEFIt. Before seeing that you have answered, I want to say that I already studied your guides before attempting to install Vista. rEFIt is really a very useful, even essential program for multi-boot purposes, in my opinion! Now I have the following problem, anyway. After a lot of work and some sleepless nights I finally got Vista installed on my external HDD (BTW, you said you would never install Windows on an external drive - I have to stress that mine is connected via eSATA, not USB or Firwire - so it is not a matter of slower speeds in my case). I can say it was a hassle to get Vista to install on it anyway, but once everything was running there were a only a few things left to sort out. I thought it would be some minor tasks, but I was wrong! First, since I ran the Vista setup from within Windows XP (because all other methods failed), the infamous Vista bootloader was placed in the root of my XP installation, which was created via BootCamp. So, everytime I started my MacBook Pro to start either Windows XP or Vista the Vista bootloader loaded after displaying numerous error messages because of the HFS+ partition on the hard disk it resided on (of course this was the Mac OS X partition, not recognized as such by stupid Windows). Then, another issue was that everytime when starting up my MBP, it would directly load the Vista bootloader instead of Mac OS X or showing up the BootCamp icons to choose between Mac OS and Windows. Although I am not quite sure, I think to remember that at some point at booting via rEFIt (which I have installed on a Memory Card) it showed up one icon for BootCamp and one for 'Legacy OS' (i.e. Vista). But now, everytime I use rEFIt it just shows up one single icon in the Windows logo look (of course alongside with the Apple logo for Mac OS X). Because the Vista bootloader was rather annoying I fiddled around with EasyBCD (which is also a neat tool for editing this nasty piece of a wannabe bootloader) to get rid of the errors and leave Vista alone in its own bootloader where as Windows XP should boot up with good old boot.ini, ntldr etc. So I copied the necessary files that belong to the Vista bootloader over to the Vista installation root on the external disk partition and tried to edited it, deleting the XP entry so that I would be able to boot into XP and delete the Vista bootloader files from the XP partition. Unfortunately this didn't work as planned, so I decided to finally format my XP partition to reinstall it and eventually let XP boot through its own bootloader while Vista should be booting with its version. So I reinstalled XP via BootCamp and thought it would give me the BootCamp icon on rEFIt together with another icon for Vista, but actually it didn't/doesn't. There is still only one icon besides of the Mac OS icon (the standard Windows logo instead of the BootCamp icon which I had before), but when I decide to boot into Windows it boots up XP but I can't get Vista to boot now. You see, this is a lot more complicated than it seems to be, but my question is: how can I make rEFIt show up an icon for Vista, since the Vista bootloader is still present on the Vista partition, installed as it should be installed (copied over the 'Boot' folder and the 'bootmgr' file to the Vista partition root and editing the entries via EasyBCD). The partition is active and so everything should be in order to boot Vista. Maybe you could have a look at the different stages of my experience in this thread (beginning on page 2). I hope you can help me. Meanwhile (after getting some sleep) I will try to solve it on my own and I'll report back if I succeed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cyman Posted June 24, 2007 Author Share Posted June 24, 2007 I had an interesting thought. I wondered what would happen if I formatted my internal MBP hard disk in the MBR pattern. Could I reinstall OS X afterwards or would the MacBook Pro not boot anymore because of missing EFI stuff? I read in the rEFIt FAQ that Mac OS X should be able to boot off MBR flavored hard disks although the Disk Utility doesn't say so, but I want to make sure it works before I try it. Then, probably the whole XP/BootCamp/Vista story will finally work as I want it to (actually my problem is still the same and unsolved, i.e. XP is installed via BootCamp, Vista on an external hard drive wired with eSATA not USB (!) and rEFIt just shows up just one Windows logo, choosing it boots up Windows XP). I just need rEFIt to show up an extra icon for Vista. What are the criteria for rEFIt to search and show up Operating Systems on its menu? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christoph Pfisterer Posted June 27, 2007 Share Posted June 27, 2007 So, I'm not quite sure where to start. For external hard drives in general: My recommendation is not based on interface speed. It is based on a few factors. One is that it's not generally a good idea to run your operating system from an external drive that you can just unplug on the fly -- operating systems don't like their main file system going away. Next one is BIOS, which wasn't really built to boot from arbitrary external drives, and there actually are known problems with C2D models in that regard. I don't know about eSATA or Windows Vista, but Windows XP also doesn't support booting from external drives (as in USB) without tweaking, because it manages to pull the USB drivers from under its own feet while booting. You say you copied the Vista bootloader to the partition on the external drive. Copying the files is part of it, but there's another part that's not in the file system, but in the partition boot sector and/or the MBR. Unless you copied that or reinstalled it to the external disk in some way there's absolutely no chance of booting from there. For detecting bootable operating systems, rEFIt scans the MBR and the partition boot sectors for boot sectors marked as bootable, and tries to determine the operating system by searching for certain strings. It also searches the file systems, but only for EFI-based boot loaders (e.g. Mac OS X). All 32-bit versions of Windows boot through BIOS and a boot sector. I'm afraid that's all the help I can render, since I don't know much about Vista's new boot menu thingy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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