Boot drive selector?

[hiroo]

I'm building a new system and want to have dual boot with 10.5.2 and Windows XP, not on the same drive, but on separate physical disks. I previously had a 10.4.x system that worked ok because the asus bios would pop up a drive list to choose which you wanted to boot from if you held down a F-key during boot, but now I am using an Intel badaxe2 and AFAIK you can't get such a list, just go into the bios and change boot order, which is a pain.

 

Is there any recommended utility or method to get a boot drive selector installed? Most of the time I want it to default into OS X but on occasion if I want to boot directly into Windows for gaming or whatever, then I could hold down a key at boot and then choose the Windows drive.

 

 

thanks in advance...

[hiroo]

does anybody have multiple physical boot drives? how are you selecting which drive to boot from?

[First]

I used to have Tiger in a partition on a secondary IDE drive and GRUB was able to boot it just fine.

[CityLights]

I'm searching for the same answer.

Whats the best, easiest and safest Boot Loader?

 

I Tried Acronis OS Selector.

It worked for a while without the mouse then it broke my windows XP install.

 

Acronis is retarded in that it doesn't keep track of your original install settings when you update something from windows. Hence, under my install conditions, any changes in the settings after the initial install will break your windows boot. So, don't don't use it!

 

update: use the chain0 method posted in next thread

 

When I installed Acronis OS Selector I thought I could install it to my 3rd Hard Drive E: leaving my XP & OSX untouched and bootable. It worked but when I updated the OS Selector settings from within Windows to use my mouse it trashed the install putting the updated settings on my C: drive instead of the E: drive.

 

My E: drive had no OS installed but was formated Active partition. I thought Acronis would install it's own OS/Boot loader. No matter were you tell Acronis to install, Acronis backups and changes the NTLDR & boot.ini on C: When I originally told Acronis to install to E: it only placed it's system files in E:\BOOTWIZ. Acronis defaulted back to the C:Bootwiz directory after updating the settings but the system files needed to boot were orphaned at E:\Bootwiz.

 

I tried to fix this by copying the NTLDR and Boot.ini from C:\BOOTWIZ\UNINSTAL\ back to C: From within OSX but OSX won't let you modify windows system files. Tried to copy the OS Selector files on E:\Bootwiz to C: and had the same problem. Solution was to connect the C: & E: drive to a working Windows computer and copy a fresh NTLDR and Boot.in to C: or copy the missing files from E:\Bootwiz to C:\Bootwiz. (wish I could have done this from within OSX as it would have saved me time from opening two computer cases and swapping the drives back and forth)

[CityLights]

ok, got duel boot working great now!

Well using this site's search got me nowhere and I'm surprised no members have assisted us. I eventually came across the best, safe and simplest answer while reading another site, so here it is....

 

Boot into windows XP and download this mac Darwin boot file Chain0 http://riccardo.raneri.it/blog/eng/wp-cont...6/08/chain0.rar

and extract the file chain0 to your windows xp root c:\

 

in windows XP open C:\Boot.ini and add this line right under [operating systems]

C:\chain0="Boot -Steve Jobs- Apple Macintosh OSX Leopard"

note, you can call your Leopard partition anything you want inside the " "

And save it.

 

And thats it! Works great!

 

What Chain0 does is looks for a OSX drive and boots it

Here's a copy of my Windows xp Boot.ini file

 

[boot loader]

timeout=11

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

 

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Boot -Bill Gates- Microsoft Windows XP" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /numproc=2

C:\chain0="Boot -Steve Jobs- Apple Macintosh OSx Leopard"

[mirciu]

Are you using 2 separate drives - 1 for Windows XP and 1 for OS X or 1 drive with 2 partitions?

[CityLights]

Mirciu, yes two drives one for each OS. (It's in my signature)

I highly suggest the method I described above if your looking to have independent drives for each OS as it doesn't alter the boot partitions or critical OS boot files like NTLDR.

 

Set your BIOS to boot from the Windows XP drive. If you want the default OS to be OSX Leopard then change the line in your Boot.ini right under timeout

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

to

default=C:\chain0

 

Note: your boot.ini file may have a different default setting them mine

[Chrillss]

But be sure to back your boot.ini up, if you do this manual way. OR follow http://dailyapps.net/2008/03/hack-attack-d...-windows-vista/ if you dont want to mess things up. Same {censored}, but doing this steps in the command prompt, and have a smaller chance to messing things up.

[naddy69]

The easiest way is to just use your computer BIOS to select the drive. Most have a keypress (mine is F12) to select which drive to boot from - DVD, HD or USB Drive - when you reset/power on. No extra software needed, no configuring boot loaders.

 

Of course, this only works with each OS on a separate drive. I could never get CHAIN0 to work on multiple drives, but it worked fine with partitions on a single drive. I have also used Extended FDISK's Boot Manager, which works fine with multiple drives.

 

With my laptops I use Boot Manager, with this desktop I'm using the BIOS.

[CityLights]

naddy69, why press a key every time you boot? ..and you have to press that F8 key at the right time during the bios boot and not all motherboard bios'es have that feature! It's a freaken computer! make it do it for you. Installing a tiny 244kb chain0 file and adding a simple line to your Boot.ini is so easy! if you got your Leopard OS installed then this should be cake in comparison.

 

Chrillss, this whole tread was about Dual boot with Windows XP. I read your link, It's about duel boot with Vista. Vista is a whole'nother cat (or Pig). It's much simpler on XP.

 

Your right for mentioning to back up the Boot.ini file, they say always backup! ..or if you know the structure of a boot.ini file then dive in!

 

If you use this method then you can expand on it to boot Linux as well. And you get a nice little OS selector menu with real OS names instead of drive model numbers as with the BIOS selector. Plus the countdown timer to load your OS of choice is very handy!

 

if you don't change any settings in the original boot.ini file and only ADD the line C:\chain0="Boot OSx Leopard" your not going to screw up! Add it as the last line under [operating systems] and you will still be able to boot into windows xp.

 

If it still doesn't boot your Leopard then your Leopard dives boot sector isn't set Active

 

here is a boot.ini file. The red text may be different on your computer. Everything in red you don't change!

Anything in Green is Safe to change.

[boot loader]

timeout=11

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

 

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Boot -Bill Gates- Microsoft Windows XP" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /numproc=2

C:\chain0="Boot OSX Leopard"

 

Just remember your computers original Rdisk settings and your windows installed directory. Some examples..

 

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

or

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWSXP

or

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWSNT

 

Link -->Additional information and help with the boot.ini

[First]

Here's the Grub menu entry that I used for booting Mac OS X from a secondary drive:

 

title Mac OS X (on /dev/hdb2)

root (hd1,1)

makeactive

map (hd0) (hd1)

map (hd1) (hd0)

chainloader +1

 

It's possible to install Mac OS X on a logical (non-primary) partition too. I got Leopard installed on /dev/hda9 and it boots via Grub with the following entry:

 

title Mac OS X

rootnoverify (hd0,4)

chainloader /boot/grub/boot0

 

where (hd0,4) is my Linux partition (/dev/hda5) and boot0 is the Mac OS X zero stage loader copied to /boot/grub.

 

Important part of the magic is to set the active flag on the logical partition and have no other active partitions. Actually boot0 doesn't do much - it just locates the current active partition (even if it's non-primary) and boots from there.