cure for turning an Extended partition into a Primary

[nsomnius]

I'm not entirely married to this present configuration, but after 3 long days of trying I've gotten a single drive, bootable windows/non-bootable-OSX to boot XP from a boot prompt that shows both : ). Though again, only windows will successfully boot, I'm just happy to finally have Mac on that menu. : P

I started with a fresh XP install, but made three partitions at that point, I think that was where things went wrong. The Mac (2nd) partition is now shown by gparted LiveCD as HFS+ beneath the dreaded Extended partition, which I read causes the chain0 failure. Is there a cure for this? Could it be as simple as telling the Extended to become Primary somehow? As I said, if repartitioning the Mac segment is easier, then fine. I really hate to have to do Windows again though. Any help is truly appreciated. I should say: 'any MORE help'... this place is amazing. Thanks all.

[wmarsh]

I'm not entirely married to this present configuration, but after 3 long days of trying I've gotten a single drive, bootable windows/non-bootable-OSX to boot XP from a boot prompt that shows both : ). Though again, only windows will successfully boot, I'm just happy to finally have Mac on that menu. : P

I started with a fresh XP install, but made three partitions at that point, I think that was where things went wrong. The Mac (2nd) partition is now shown by gparted LiveCD as HFS+ beneath the dreaded Extended partition, which I read causes the chain0 failure. Is there a cure for this? Could it be as simple as telling the Extended to become Primary somehow? As I said, if repartitioning the Mac segment is easier, then fine. I really hate to have to do Windows again though. Any help is truly appreciated. I should say: 'any MORE help'... this place is amazing. Thanks all.

OS X generally likes primary partitions. You can however boot extended partition using grub and pc_efi.

If your 3rd partition is Linux, that would be an easy fix. If its fat32, you can write grub files there manually. NTFS or HFS+ won't work.

 

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