sangria Posted August 11, 2007 Share Posted August 11, 2007 hi there, i installed mac os x yesterday on my IBM Thinkpad T43p. windows xp is on the first primary partition and mac os x is the fourth primary partition. i use grub via grubinstall, (http://www.geocities.com/lode_leroy/grubinstall/) so my windows bootloader is not changed. windows booted just fine. and mac os x booted, too. but after i tried to reboot from mac os x for the first time, i get the "missing operating system" error. i found out, that windows needs the first partition to be bootable, but mac os x always sets the fourth partition to be bootable. -> my bootloader does no longer work. then i change the bootable flag back to the primary partition using knoppix/cfdisk. windows xp works fine, but when i boot to mac os x, it changes the bootable flag again. i don't want to change it back using knoppix everytime i used mac os x. how can i stop mac os x from doing this? any suggestions? thank you Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/59702-mac-os-x-changes-bootable-flag-of-my-hdd/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
rumble291 Posted August 11, 2007 Share Posted August 11, 2007 You cant use 2 primary partitions on one hard drive without having problems because the BIOS doesnt know which partition to boot from. I suggest you delete one of the partitions and make another one but this time make sure you put it as active. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/59702-mac-os-x-changes-bootable-flag-of-my-hdd/#findComment-425046 Share on other sites More sharing options...
sangria Posted August 11, 2007 Author Share Posted August 11, 2007 in fact i have 3 primary partitions. the third one is some ibm stuff, which has always been there and windows xp worked. i want to keep my windows xp partition, which is primary, so i would have to put mac os x on an extended one, but then it wouldn't work. everything would be fine if mac os x would not set the bootflag to partition 4. --- i just noticed that grub changes the active partitions: menu.lst: ... title Mac OS X rootnoverify (hd0,3) makeactive chainloader +1 is there an easy way to set the active partition back to hd0,0 in mac os x? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/59702-mac-os-x-changes-bootable-flag-of-my-hdd/#findComment-425048 Share on other sites More sharing options...
BJMoose Posted August 11, 2007 Share Posted August 11, 2007 I don't have a handle on your problem yet, but I don't think it's a matter of primary vs. non-primary partitions on the same drive. OSX requires a primary partition and case in point, most all the partitions on my HDs are primary and everything in windows and osx runs quite well. I'm not familiar with grub and how it adds the boot flag. I know others here use that. I've used norton partition magic and acronis disk manager to do it successfully. I dual boot using chain0 method. Good luck! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/59702-mac-os-x-changes-bootable-flag-of-my-hdd/#findComment-425075 Share on other sites More sharing options...
sangria Posted August 11, 2007 Author Share Posted August 11, 2007 how can i write these commands as a bash script, so that automator will run it? terminal: sudo fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0 (password) f 1 write y exit Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/59702-mac-os-x-changes-bootable-flag-of-my-hdd/#findComment-425093 Share on other sites More sharing options...
sangria Posted August 12, 2007 Author Share Posted August 12, 2007 Acronis OS Selector solved my problem. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/59702-mac-os-x-changes-bootable-flag-of-my-hdd/#findComment-425850 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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