Dual boot windows 7 and OS X

D

devboy

Member
Hi,

I've been trying to boot up an OS X installation side by side with my win 7 for the past couple of days...

I have several HDDs, C: holds win7 D: is the mac (those 2 are on the same device). E: is on a separate HDD. The reason I bring up E: in the first place is that, that (I believe) is where my system boots from (bootmgr!?). The reason it's there is probably that this machine has gone through multiple reinstalls in the past and was dual boot well before today.

So... After I got my OS X all set up, I put the Win 7 Setup DVD back in. repaired the boot and so now I'm in win 7. d/l EasyBCD 2.0 beta and tried to add an OS X entry. It added it alright, but when rebooting and choosing OS X from the boot menu, I get to a grub command line. I tried messing around with that and basically could 'root' all partitions except the one that has the mac. I also tried going back into EasyBCD to 'change settings' and change the drive letter for the OS X entry. I couldn't find the partition I was looking for in the dropdown. Windows disk manager reports it as a "healthy, active, primary partition", but does not allow me to take any action on it besides 'delete'. Remember, the active plays no part here since I'm booting from another HDD. I tried unhiding the partition. At that point win7 explorer was showing it as well as EasyBCD, but when changed the drive for the entry and saved it did not stick. After a windows reboot it was hidden once more - no idea why.

Any ideas anyone? Should EasyBCD take care of this scenario or am I missing the point?
 
If you have OSX on another hard drive that has the guid partition table you need to add a fat32 or ntfs partition to the hard drive for it to work. I am no expert but that is how I got it to work. The best thing to do imo is to install mac os to an MBR disk. There are guides on how to do this and that's what I eventually did now everything works perfect. Windows 7 on one disk and Ubuntu and Snow leopard on another disk.
 
Thanks for the reply deihmos,

Since most of this is new to me, some clarifications... You mention a GUID partition table. That disk holds 2 partitions the first (physically first on HDD) was formatted using OS X's disk utility with the "Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) option. The second is the win7 NTFS. the NTFS one was there BEFORE. How do I know what the partition table is for that disk? Secondly my boot loader starts at a completely separate drive. Does the order of OS X and win7 partitions matter on the drive itself?

If I were to install OS X on a separate HDD, and set BIOS to boot from that would the OS X take care of everything on that disk i.e. boot loader etc?

If I can do that, maybe I can do it the other way around and use boot camp to boot windows instead of BCD to boot the OS X?

Cheers,
DB
 
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