discmeister Posted January 31, 2008 Share Posted January 31, 2008 Firstly, just have to say that this is a great forum. There is so much knowledge on here - hence this post! I badly need help and am hoping that someone will take pity on me. I'm building a Hackintosh machine for a friend. Rough specs are as follows: Asus P5B-VM Core2Duo E4500 2Gb 533Mhz Kingston RAM Maxtor 250Gb SATA Drive Optiarc SATA DVD/RW Asus 7300GS PCI-E I've successfully installed Windows XP Pro SP2, and Kalyway 10.5.1 Leopard (non-vanilla - will try vanilla later on today), each as the sole operation system on the machine. However, I'm completely stumped when it comes to how to get both operating systems on there at the same time. The partitioning has me completely confused. I installed XP first - created a 120Gb partition in the XP set-up program, which it called C:, and left the rest of the drive as free space. But having installed XP fine, I booted up the Kalyway DVD and loaded Disk Utility - the only part of the Maxtor drive it would allow me to partition was the space that was already formatted as NTFS. Which is to say the space occupied by my Windows XP installation! Can someone provide or point me in the direction of some simple (really simple) instructions on how I should correctly partition the drive, in which order I should install the operating systems and how I should set up the dual boot system? (and no, I don't mean the Wiki, because I've read all of them back to front and can't find a guide on partioning in there). I have an idea - if I can get the two OSs happily partitioned and installed - that I can use EasyBCD within Windows to achieve the OS selector at bootup (using a Vista bootloader from a laptop). But is this correct? Please help. I was so thrilled at 0041 last night when Leopard booted up (in no time at all!) and am, to put it mildly, a trifle embarrassed that the simple act of partitioning has me stumped... Discy Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/84828-another-newbie-needing-help-with-multi-boot/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dany Boy Posted February 3, 2008 Share Posted February 3, 2008 I'm gonna put some information about the boot process, and so of the partition system used. Theres an old chinesse proverb: "Dont give fish to the hungry man, teach him how to fish". I wanna return something to this forum because i got an almost fully working laptop with Mac OS Tiger (SD card reader not working, mic doesnt deactivate speakers, and rosetta problems). Sorry but i dont speak english pretty well, so you will have to conjeture what im trying to say. Partition system: You have a hard drive of certain size. It is a de facto standard that this hard drive can at most have 4 primary partitions. This is beacuse the first 512 bytes in the hard drive have a little code (i think its called bootstrap code, or mbr code). Its in the first 446 bytes of your drive. The next 64 bytes (446 to 510) are supposed to describe the way your hard disk is partitioned. It takes 16 bytes to fully describe one partition: 1 byte to know if its bootable or not. Another byte to say the filesystem type within that partition (0xAF for mac, 0X07 for NTFS and so on). 6 bytes to know the CHS (Cylinder Head Sector) of starting and ending sectors of partition, and 8 bytes to know the Starting and ending LBA address. This makes 16 bytes in total. Thus, with 64 bytes you can only have 4 primary partitions. When XP installs on your hard drive, and you make a partition that does not uses all of your hard drive, XP writes down to the MBR the entry for that partition. So you have just one partition entry. That is, XP created a partition, but the rest isnt registered as a partition. Its empty both in the physical space in the hard drive, and in the partition table of the MBR. When you insert Leopard install DVD, it reads the MBR, and only "sees" that partition created by XP. What you need to do, is to CREATE the other partition entry in the MBR's partition table. In Windows: Start - Right click on My Computer, Manage. In the window that appears, go to Disk Manager (not sure, my XP is in spanish...). You'll see your XP partition and another "Unused space", "unpartitioned", or whatever. Right click on it and give it any format (NTFS-FAT32, doesnt matter, as you will re-format it with HFS+) Restart And install Leopard. Boot Process For this purposes, im only gonna descirbe that part of the process that puts the OS in memory. Once BIOS checks devices, starts cpu, etc, it starts reading the MBR code of the primary IDE's master drive. This code is executed by CPU, and what it actually does is read the partition table (first 446-510 bytes in that drive). It is looking up for the bootable partition, wich is called the active partition. The byte indicating that it is bootable should be set to 80 hexadecimal, otherwise should be zero. Once it finds that partition, it goes to the first 512 bytes of that partition, and makes sure it is really bootable (checking the called magic number -last 2 bytes of first sector should be 55aa hexadecimal). If it is, then starts to execute the code in the first byte of that partition. All of this is almost OS-independent. Once the partition is starting, in the case of Windows, it loads the NTLDR executable into memory (located in C:), wich in turns starts windows. It reads the C:/boot.ini file, wich can allocate all the OS bootables from Windows. In the case of a Mac, it starts and has its own bootloader (i guess its called darwine, dont mind me). Now, why all of these? First, you can never screw up things by installing OS in diferent orders. For example, if you install Linux GRUB it changes the MBR code. Formating the Linux Partition and installing Windows there or Mac or whatever, is gonna make you an unbootable system. All you need to do is "repair" the MBR so its one generic MBR code (GRUB is not). Second, adter installing XP and Mac you can decide wether to start Mac or XP by default. You can also choose wich one will be the Loader: Mac's Darwine or XP's NTLDR. I personally prefer NTLDR because its configurable via the Boot.ini, adding anything you want. Darwine can only start the 4 primary partitions and there are no more options. Also, Darwine will always start by default the active partition, and Windows's NTLDR allows you to choose any OS as the default. The default bootloader (Darwin or NTLDR -btw, NTLDR stands for NT Loader) will be that located on the active partition. So if you want to make Mac the default OS, you can make its partition the active one, or you can putting an entry in boot.ini then making it the default. Etc. All of the little description about boot process and partitioning system, should let you be able to repair any damaged installation. Its often a little mistake that makes a system unbootable, and, for only 440 wrong bytes, the most of the people will reinstall everything from the beginning. Get a Live CD (Knoppix, for example), and learn to use the dd linux utility. In any case, its most likely you will need the chain0, the code that properly boots Mac. It should be located in the Windows Partition as a file, and add the entry in boot.ini. Or you can put it as the MBR code, so it will load Mac directly. Any question, ill be here to help. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/84828-another-newbie-needing-help-with-multi-boot/#findComment-606090 Share on other sites More sharing options...
discmeister Posted February 3, 2008 Author Share Posted February 3, 2008 Oh Dany Boy (etc. etc.!) Many, many thanks for this. I've been on such a high and low over the last few days, having managed to get OS X working perfectly, then struggling to get it working alongside XP etc. I've just wasted everything on the hard disk, followed your instructions (might have guessed it'd be something deep within Windows XP - I've only been using the OS for more than half a decade and it STILL catches me out, huh?!) and it now works. I suggest that someone with real power in OSX86 takes a look at your post and adds it to the Wiki. Because while I'm no genius (clearly), I'm not completely clueless on computers and yet this process had me baffled (whereas the machine that I'd specced and put together specially for the job works perfectly). Once again, thank you. Discy Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/84828-another-newbie-needing-help-with-multi-boot/#findComment-606976 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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