OSX Was Booting Great, Then it Broke, Details Included

[tpmwr]

Hey Everyone!

 

I did alot of searching on this and have tried a ton of solutions, but nothing has worked for me. I have an IBM T42 Laptop w/ a Pentium M 1.6Ghz, 2GB PC2700 RAM, 160GB HDD.

 

My Harddrive is broken into 3 Partitions. 100GB Vista Partition (NTFS), 30GB XP Partition (NTFS) (OS Not Installed Yet) and a 30GB OSX Partition with Leopard Installed. Now of course those numbers were rough estimates as a 160GB is unfortunatally nowhere near 160GB in capacity.

 

I have just installed Leopard on the third partition. With the OSX Install disk in the OS loads great. But without the OSX disk in, or with the Vista Partition set as the Active Partition I get an "HFS+ Partition Error". I have tried the fdisk -u solutions posted on different threads of these forums. I have also checked to make sure the OSX partition is set to Primary and not Logical.

 

My main goal here is to have Vista as the main Partition and use it's boot menu to chose between Vista, XP and OSX. I currently have the bootloader already setup on the partition, using EasyBSD. The issues is, if I chose OSX I get the "HFS+ Partition Error". My other concern is that last time I did something like this with Tiger once I selected OSX from Vista's bootloader, Darwin's bootloader would come up, and have Vista (the active partition) selected by default and I would have to select OSX again. If it has to be that way then I understand, but I would really like to atleast get OSX booting through the Vista bootloader, even if it involves Darwin's bootloader aswell.

 

Thanks in advance!

-Anthony

[tpmwr]

Someone must have some info on this situation, I'm sure I'm not the first person with this issue. x.x As I stated, OSX runs great, I just need to get it booting great now.

 

-Anthony

[fulg]

I've set up my multibooting manually (not using EasyBCD) and it works "almost" fine. I've tried EasyBCD before without success (trying to multiboot Linux), now I don't trust it.

 

I assume you've done an MBR install of OSX86 since you're multibooting. I don't know how to multiboot using GUID (my understanding now is that this isn't possible, but what do I know, I'm just an OSX86 n00b!).

 

You can add OSX to the Vista boot menu in two easy steps:

1. Copy the chain0 file from your OSX86 DVD to the root of your Vista drive (typically C:\).
   
2. From an administrator command prompt in Vista, type these commands:
   

C:\>bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Mac OS X"

The entry was successfully copied to

{4c7c9f2d-b66d-11dc-aa78-001bfcb39303}

.

 

C:\>bcdedit /set

{4c7c9f2d-b66d-11dc-aa78-001bfcb39303}

PATH \chain0

The operation completed successfully.

Note, the numbers in red will be different on your system, do not copy mine they won't work!

 

The only "problem" with using Vista's bootloader is that the Darwin bootloader defaults to booting the active partition, which is Vista !

 

For the moment, after selecting OSX in Vista's bootloader I just press a key during the Darwin countdown and select the OSX partition to boot. There's supposed to be a parameter to set in com.apple.Boot.plist to force the use of another partition ("rd=disk0s2") but it didn't work for me. This is very minor, so for the moment I live with it...

[tpmwr]

Hey fulg!

 

Thanks for the reply. Apparently the issue is when I installed OSX I chose the guid EFi and not the mbr EFi. So I could not boot it without the CD. So I re-installed OSX using the mbr EFi and then used EasyBCD and everything worked great. I still get the issue with Darwin's bootloader auto-selecting Vista, and just like you I tried the whole rd= thing waaaay back in Tigar with no avail, so I think I'm just gonna live with it.

 

-Anthony