Multi Boot

I uninstalled from vista and from xp. I booted in xp and reinstalled it only there. Mac os x still doesn't boot. Nevermind. I guess I cannot have both vista and macosx. Thank you anyway. I told you a couple posts above that I had NST on both partitions. It wasn;t taht the problem. The mbr file in the NST dir does not boot mac os x. I see a blank sreen with a cursor like the darwin boot then the screen goes back to vista boot loader.
 
Oh!

OK. No one has complained about the Mac OS X bootloader not working via EasyBCD before - it's worked for the majority.
I have it running perfectly right now too - but a thought: is it on a different hard drive?
 
i know this is stupid, but can you run MAC OS X on a standard PC, i thought it would only run on a MAC< i've been wanting to try for ages now but never attempted it?
 
*cough* yes *cough*

But that's not exactly legal for 99.999% of the people, so we don't officially talk about it here.
EasyBCD has that function for the .001% of the people that are legal so they can use EasyBCD in peace. :smile:
 
yes you can run it on a PC and before i installed vista everything was running smooothly. Puter would boot by default into osx. if i wanted xp i could press F8 at boot to choose xp from teh darwin bootloader. with vista bootloader I only have two choices(xp and vista) and easybcd did not help.
 
easybcd is till awesome because at least i can restore my mbr to xp if i want to get rid of vista. i assume microsoft wouldn't do that automatically unless you upgraded windows to vista from xp and then unintall vista. If you have two oses as i do if you wipe out vista you can't boot xp. So, easybcd comes in handy here to restore your boot to xp.
 
Computer Guru said:
Oh!

OK. No one has complained about the Mac OS X bootloader not working via EasyBCD before - it's worked for the majority.
I have it running perfectly right now too - but a thought: is it on a different hard drive?
 
It is gone. Nevermind. I deleted the OSX partition. It just didn't work and don't have time to waste with this anymore.
I have osx on an external hardrive and that boots fine with no BCD and other vista crap.
Thanks anyway
 
Damn, sorry to hear that.
I've been looking really hard, I don't see where this problem is coming from.. too late now though :smile:
 
I will remove vista as well. It's too hardware demanding. there is no decent video driver for my radeon 9000 mobility card either. ATI has no plans to make a driver for my card for vista. It looks nice but I guess i would need a newer puter to run it well.
 
ok. removed vista bootloader using easyBCD. I will reinstall osx on my internal hardrive aftre I wipe teh vista partition
 
You can also save yourself some time and just clone the external partition to your internal hard drive with a decent partition manager like Acronis (paid) or Paragon (free).
 
That's how it ended in the internal HD in the first place. Unfortunately i need xp for work. i need to use lots of software that are not developed for mac.
Anyway I didn't quite do what I said unfortunately, to remove vista and osx. So, I managed to screw up my system again. This time I setup the osx partition as active but i forgot to remove teh bcd loader first. Now when i boot, the bcd loader comes up and osx boot says chainload error. xp doesn't boot since the active partition is setup to osx, and vista doens't boot either. when I try to look at the partition table using gpart from an external cd, well, suprise, suprise: my partitions are gone. However if i boot in osx from my external drive it still sees all my partitions but only mounts the xp system partition. Diskutil sees the partition but cannot operate on them since teh disk uses a fdisk partition scheme.

IS there a way to remove BCD now and restore my MBR without booting into windows? obviously something is screwed up in the MBR since from fdisk and gpart I don't see my partitions.
 
OK, you can switch back to the XP bootloader (NTLDR) by booting from the XP/2k/2k3 boot CD and entering the recovery console, then issuing the following command:
Code:
fixboot
fixmbr
fixboot
However, this won't bring your OS X/Darwin bootloader back from the dead.
 
I am afraid those commands won't help me since the osx partition is set as primary/active and fdisk and i suspect diskpart in nt based systems won't see my partitions although they are there. Booting from a Gpart disk it shows my disk as unallocated. I have an acronis boot disk at home which i can try but i am afraid it will show the same thing.

But since I have no other option will try when i get home. Don't have an xp boot disk with me :smile:
Thanks
 
Ouch!!!

Let me know what Acronis shows, if it shows the same I can walk you through the steps to recover deleted partitions without data loss.
 
Great! I did just waht you said and manage dto scrw up my mac os disk (the external). Since when i booted from xp cd it could not find any partition on the internal HD it did the fixing on my external HD which I forgot plugged in. Now Mac OSX doesn't boot either and I am really pissed off. this easy bcd made a mess of my puter and it's anything but easy.
So u know I managed to restore with my acronis cd teh main two ntfs partitions on teh internal hd. I reinstalled osx on another primary partition (this time is the second primary partition after xp). Your bcd will not boot it. Period. I am sick of this! Do you have any idea how can i fix my darwin boot on the external hard drive, hopefully without screwing the internal one again? And how can i delete the "boot" folder and bootmgr? Although i uninstalled bcd they are still there and can't delete them.

thanks
 
hey, we obviously don't speak the same language. I did not format any disk from acronis.
I issued the commands you told me from the windows xp disk. that rewrote the mbr on the wrong disk. Simply because it was plugged in and the internal hd was not recognized. However when i booted from the acronis recovery disk it recognized the internal partitions and all i had to do was to setup up the xp partition as active. The external mac osx will not boot anymore since its MBR was rewritten by FIXBOOT/FIXMBR/FIXBOOT commands.
I reinstalled osx on a internal primary partition i created and I will now erase the external and repartition and format it for osx. I don't need easy bcd since osx from internal HD boots directly and i wiped out vista. If i want xp i can press F8 at boot to get the darwin menu and choose xp. I understand you really wanted to help. Unfortunately nothing worked from what you suggested or at least did not have the results I expected.
Thank you anyway.
 
In that case, I'm sorry EasyBCD didn't work for you.

The commands I gave you are made by MS to reset the bootsector on the default hard drive - I wasn't aware your external was being seen as such.

Maybe in the future you'll find EasyBCD working to your needs.
 
Back
Top