Dual Booting Win 7 and Snow Leopard

lemmyc

Member
Hi all,
I have Win 7 and Snow Leopard happily working alongside each other. Each are on separate hard disks. To have the option of booting into both, I set the SL disk as first in the boot sequence. I press a key at the Darwin prompt, and there I can choose from SL or Win7.

I would prefer to use EasyBCD - I believe it can chain the Darwin loader so that the boot menu is a one step process?

Anyway, I've set up EasyBCD 2.0 on Win 7, and set the win disk to be first in the boot sequence.
I've added SL as an option in the boot menu, but all the options I've tried so far don't boot SL.

The SL drive doesn't have a letter in the Win 7 disk management utility, and one can't be assigned to it. When I add OSX as a boot option, I'm given the following drive options: A, C, D, E, BOOT
Well drive E is a media storage hard disk in Win 7, so I've tried D and BOOT, but neither worked. (Using MBR option. Pretty sure I tried the default option with those too.)

Any ideas on what I should do? By the way, SL was installed using the Kakewalk method. (See Kakewalk)
Thanks.
 
OK, I see the NTS folder is on C: so I should leave it set to the default drive, C.
Trying that, and trying to select OSX at the boot menu I get a message saying 'Cannot find GRLDR in all devices'. Above that there are entries for each of the three drives, like this (from memory, may not b e 100% accurate):

h(0,1) No ang0
h(0,2) invalid or null
h(0,3) invalid or null
h(1,1) non-MS: skip
h(1,2) invalid or null
h(1,3) invalid or null
h(2,1) no ang0
h(2,2) invalid or null
h(3,3) invalid or null

Addendum:

Trying the MBR method gives a Chain Booting Error.
 
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Do you have a file named ANG0 in the root of your Windows 7 partition?

Maybe you're having a problem with the NTFS file directory as described in the thread at:
EasyBCD 2.0.0.99 NeoGrub: Cannot fint GRLDR - The NeoSmart Forums

If you use EasyBCD to install NeoGrub to your boot menu, can you successfully boot into NeoGrub Bootloader?

About Snow Leopard: If you have a retail DVD then the DVD contains Boot Camp drivers. If you have a .dmg file, then there's a method to extract Boot Camp drivers from the .dmg file. The drivers include a file system driver (AppleHFS.sys and AppleMNT.sys) for viewing HFS disks in Windows (I don't know if it's possible to install just those files though). You may also need to sync the MBR to the GPT if Windows does not understand the GUID partition table to make the HFS partition known to Windows.
 
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Hi joevt,
There is no ang0 in the Win 7 root.
I don't know what the GPT is, so you've lost me there. Windows can certainly see the structure of the Mac partitions. It just doesn't allow me to name them. Are the drivers you're talking about Windows drivers?
 
Your Mac OS X entry in EasyBCD can be like one of the following:

The MBR option:
Code:
Name: NST Mac OS X
BCD ID: {7730f027-8267-11df-a8ca-001ff3b6c265}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \NST\nst_mac.mbr

The EFI option:
Code:
Name: NST Mac OS X
BCD ID: {7730f028-8267-11df-a8ca-001ff3b6c265}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \NST\AutoNeoGrub0.mbr

I don't know what nst_mac.mbr does. I guess it just calls some blocks on the disk (the boot blocks of some partition?) after verifying the contents of those blocks? And then gives a Chain Booting Error if it doesn't like what it sees.

AutoNeoGrub0.mbr looks for ANG0. it should be in the root directory of the same partition containing the \NST\ folder. Maybe it got installed to a different partition or it got deleted? Try making a new Mac OS X EFI entry in EasyBCD and make sure there's a corresponding ANG# file that goes with the new \NST\AutoNeoGrub#.mbr file.

ANG0 does GRUB stuff like this:
Code:
find --set-root --ignore-floppies /NST/nst_mac.iso
map --mem /NST/nst_mac.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)
boot

GPT stands for GUID Partition Table. It includes space for an MBR. If your hard drive is using just the normal Windows Partition Table (MBR) then forget what I said.

The drivers are Windows drivers that Apple includes on the Snow Leopard DVD. The drivers are visible when the DVD is used in Windows. You don't need to be able to see the files on the Mac partition in Windows to be able to boot Mac OS X.

I haven't installed Mac OS X on a PC so I don't know if EasyBCD will work with your Mac OS X setup.
 
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