Guide to dual-boot Tiger and XP

[Free4Mac]

This is a guide I put together for my own reference, from various sources as well as some information I haven't seen published elsewhere.

 

This guide assumes your BIOS can boot from USB drives. It uses the Windows XP boot loader to provide a menu, because the Darwin boot loader doesn't support selecting a different default OS (e.g., Windows); it always boots the Active partition (OSx86) by default.

 

Back up all drives that have anything important on them. For Windows, I use Acronis True Image Home to back up to a USB drive. You'll be repartitioning/reformatting all drives that will have OSx86 partitions, to ensure that they are Primary partitions. The OSX Disk Utility apparently can't format Extended partitions as HFS+ (they are grayed out).

 

I found it easiest to install OSx86 first onto a temporary hard drive; if ATA, by booting from a USB DVD drive. Once OSx86 is running on ATA, install any SATA drivers needed (e.g., for nForce chipsets, from here: nForce SATA kext). You should have a bootable OSx86 backup drive anyway.

 

Use the BIOS (F12 on Gigabyte MB, F8 on ASUS) to boot the OSx86 backup drive.

 

Run Disk Utility. Partition the target drive into 2-4 partitions, as desired. Set the type of all of them to MS-DOS (to leave room for the boot loader). Click Options and select MBR. Format.

 

Select each partition that will be used for OSx86 and click Erase. Format the partition as HFS+ (Journaled).

 

Install Clonetool Hatchery. I used the version from the XXX 10.4.11 DVD. It comes with a script to run once to set up frameworks so it will work. Run the script. (The script reportedly doesn't work under 10.5.)

 

Run Clonetool Hatchery. Uncheck Erase Disk, but leave Bless checked. Optionally leave checked Repair Permissions and Update Prebinding for the source drive, if you haven't done those recently. For the Source and Clone drives, select the backup drive and the target OSx86 partition (they might be selected automatically). Click Hatch.

 

Copy /usr/standalone/i386/chain0 to a USB Flash drive.

 

Shut down OSx86. Boot from the Acronis recovery CD. Restore the C partition and MBR/Track 0 to the target drive. Restore it as an Active partition. Or do a fresh install of Windows. Reboot into Windows.

 

Copy chain0 from the Flash drive to C:\.

Use Notepad to edit C:\boot.ini and add a line at the bottom:

C:\chain0="OSX"

 

Reboot. Windows should give you a boot menu, defaulting to Windows XP but giving you the option of the Darwin boot loader: "OSX".

 

If you select OSX and get the Darwin boot loader, you have 8 seconds to press Return to get the Darwin boot menu. It will default to Windows (the Active partition), so if you let it time out it will return you to the Windows boot menu. Cursor down to your OSx86 partition and press Return to boot OSx86.

 

If selecting OSX from the Windows boot menu didn't give you the Darwin boot loader, you can install the Darwin boot loader like this:

 

Boot from the OSx86 temporary drive again.

 

Download Apple's startupfiletool from here:

startupfiletool binary

Unzip it and copy it to /usr/sbin.

 

Start Terminal and run sudo bash.

Run df to determine the name of the disk with your OSx86 boot partition on it, e.g. disk0s3.

 

Run the following commands. Set diskpart and vol to match yours; vol is the name of the disk volume of your OSx86 installation (the name on the desktop and Finder sidebar), and diskpart is what you determined with df.

 

diskpart=0s3
vol=hackintosh
diskutil unmount disk${diskpart}
cd /usr/standalone/i386
dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdisk${diskpart} bs=512 count=1
startupfiletool -v /dev/rdisk${diskpart} boot
bless -device /dev/disk${diskpart} -setBoot -verbose
diskutil mount disk${diskpart}
bless -mount /volumes/${vol}/ -setBoot –verbose

 

Reboot. If restoring the Darwin boot loader somehow broke your Windows installation, just reinstall Windows by booting from the Acronis CD again, and re-do the chain0 step.

 

You can set the active partition to boot from from OSx86 in Terminal with the following commands (partition 3 in this example, the OSx86 partition above):

 

fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
update
flag 3
write
quit

 

Use the Windows Disk Management console to reformat any other Windows partitions from MS-DOS (FAT32) back to NTFS, and restore their files from backups.