Dual boot

[radx]

How do I modify Dawrin loader to give me a menu with choices?

 

Thanks in advance,

rad

[Vincent Kwok]

Ok here's my question. I have 2 SATA hdds. OS X is sitting on first, uses GUID. x64 Vista is sitting on second, also uses GUID. x64 Vista is accessible from Fusion from within OS X. Whenever I want to boot either of these OSes natively, i press F8 during boot and select boot disk.

 

Now, a million dollar question. How do I modify Dawrin loader to give me a menu with choices?

 

Thanks in advance,

rad

I want know too, help you push .

[TheTimster]

theres no way to force darwin to "give you a menu" persay, but you can add a timeout period to the darwin bootloader. you have to edit the com.apple.boot.plist and add a timeout period (in seconds). with that edit, when you boot, the bootloder will count down, if you press any key during the timeout, you can select the drive to boot from, otherwise it will boot osx

[radx]

theres no way to force darwin to "give you a menu" persay, but you can add a timeout period to the darwin bootloader. you have to edit the com.apple.boot.plist and add a timeout period (in seconds). with that edit, when you boot, the bootloder will count down, if you press any key during the timeout, you can select the drive to boot from, otherwise it will boot osx

I have done that, but it only lists partitions from my first drive d0s0, d0s1, d0s2. And no partitions from my second drive, which is what I need. So the real question is how do I make that drive visible / available in menu? There's really gotta be a way to do this. Should I try asking on BSD / FreeBSD forums?

[TheTimster]

as far as i know, darwin doesnt seem to recognize additional drives, but i could be wrong. maybe someone else can help you

[radx]

as far as i know, darwin doesnt seem to recognize additional drives, but i could be wrong. maybe someone else can help you

nod =)

It seems so. I'll try digging deeper.

Thanks =)

[kstephens98]

Try using a different bootloader. I use GRUB. What are you trying to dual boot? I triple boot Vista, Leopard, Sabayon Linux. You could also try Easy BCD.

[TheTimster]

bootmgr and winload are vista's boot utilities. i think grub is your only option, butsince ur running uid, you may be in a pickle! (theres a phrase you probably haven't heard in a while )

[radx]

bootmgr and winload are vista's boot utilities. i think grub is your only option, butsince ur running uid, you may be in a pickle! (theres a phrase you probably haven't heard in a while )

LOL, no that's precisely describes where I am =)

[TheTimster]

yeah i think you might be

[kstephens98]

Might try something along these lines:

 

1. Boot into BIOS and change boot device to your second drive.

2. Boot into VISTA.

3. Install Easy BCD

4. Configure Vista Bootloader using Easy BCD and add OSX partition.

 

Maybe worth a try.

[TheTimster]

that would most likely work, but he'd have to configure it manually using the chain loader. also, usually easybcd can only create an entry for mac. after that yo have to configure it manually becasue windows doesnt recognize HFS+ partitions. but that actually would work if he's good with the commandline version of bcdedit (included with vista). microsoft has documentation for editing bcd. because of darwin not recognizing extra drives, it would default to the4 active partition on its disk, hence leopard would boot automatically. i didnt think of that. nice one kstephens

[Aratmanecomus]

I used EasyBCD and when I load Leopard Darwin bootloader "sees" two options HP (vista) and disk0s2 (leopard). If I press f8 I can choose tha leopard partition and it works flawlesly. Is it possible to make darwin loads Leopard as standadrd (so I don't need to press f8)?

[TheTimster]

set the leopard partition as active in diskpart (windows command line). but this will most likely break windows updating functionality and you won't be to use the windows boot manager, you will only be able to boot from darwin into windows.