davidyaha Posted March 28, 2008 Share Posted March 28, 2008 OK it goes like this: i have a working copy of OSX installed on my 250GB sata drive for some time now.... i kind of missed playing games so i'v decided to take an old HD and install vista on it... thing is its a IDE drive and i have only one IDE slot on my mobo... so i made it slave and my optic drive master and connected it on the same bus.... vista said it cannot be installed because it cant write files on my first (osx MBR) drive... so i disconnected it and tried again... this time it worked.... now after installation was finished i connected my sata drive back.... i thought i will be able to choose wich drive to boot from using the BIOS but i was wrong... my BIOS only gives general names of booting options (floppy, cd rom, hard drive, USB-HD etc.) so that option was down... then i thought i can use the vista bootloader... well i can.... and it works... only that i have to disconnect my sata disk to get there... so that is not a really good option too... darwin wont show the vista install, only mac.... so what can i do? pls HELP!!! lets get things straight: sata is my boot default... how can i make my IDE to be the default or get it to boot from there without making it default...???? THANKS AHEAD TO ALLLLLL HELPERS!!!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wmarsh Posted March 28, 2008 Share Posted March 28, 2008 If you have any unformated space on your SATA HDD, you could use a Linux Live CD to format that as ext3. Then install grub to MBR of SATA disk, with the grub files on the ext3 partition. Unfortunately you will have to do this manually, but if you type "man grub" in Linux terminal, you get good directions. Or if you don't want to install grub manually, and don't mind reinstalling OS X, make it a triple boot system with a 10GB or so Linux partition on SATA drive. You can put boot_v8 there too so OS X is accessible. http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...mp;#entry606752 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidyaha Posted March 28, 2008 Author Share Posted March 28, 2008 thanks for the reply!! 2 problems with your method.... 1. i don't have any unformatted space. 2. i do mind reinstalling because i will lose my data and prefs... ant it took me a while till i got everything to work.... One thing i cant understand is why would i need to make triple boot with linux... i dont use it at all actually and i prefer having a lot of space in my osX partition then wasting space on that.... is it a must for my config to work?? there is no way to make darwin recognize my vista partition? something like chain0 on osX partition? Thanks Ahead!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
westwaerts Posted March 28, 2008 Share Posted March 28, 2008 whats about updating your bios, maybe a newer version shows more options ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidyaha Posted March 29, 2008 Author Share Posted March 29, 2008 i will try thanks!! more options maybe? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wmarsh Posted March 29, 2008 Share Posted March 29, 2008 thanks for the reply!! 2 problems with your method.... 1. i don't have any unformatted space. 2. i do mind reinstalling because i will lose my data and prefs... ant it took me a while till i got everything to work.... One thing i cant understand is why would i need to make triple boot with linux... i dont use it at all actually and i prefer having a lot of space in my osX partition then wasting space on that.... is it a must for my config to work?? there is no way to make darwin recognize my vista partition? something like chain0 on osX partition? Thanks Ahead!! You don't actually have to install Linux, you just need to have a grub readable partition on which to store some files. Grub can't read hfs+ or ntfs If you have unformated space on your ide drive, these files could live there. And even if you don't, you can shrink ntfs with parted without loosing your install. You may want to boot a Linux liveCD and check your SATA drive with parted. Frequently, even if you partitioned your whole disk on install, there is actually a little unused space on which parted can create a tiny 2nd partition. However, if you put grub in the MBR of SATA drive and boot_v8 on a partition of your IDE drive, it would be annoying because you would have to enter 80 during the 2 second delay in booting to make boot_v8 find OS X on the 1st HDD. I don't know of a way to make Darwin do what you want, perhaps someone else does. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts