General questions

I

infiniter

Member
Hello!
I'm new to EasyBCD. I installed Vista and MacOS X Leopard besides XP. Vista and XP boot fine. Because MacOS is on the primary partition on my 2nd HD, I need to set this HD in the BIOS to main in order to boot Leopard. This works fine. But now I wanted to use EasyBCD to set this up by using the Vista boot manager. I tried and it failed. So:

a) How can EasyBCD set up a device entry for a partition it does not see? The Mac partition is Mac format and since it is primary, it will be drive D: in the boot stage. I can only choose it for a new MacOS entry. Then...

b) EasyBCD creates an entry like this
Name: Mac OS X
BCD ID: {f266bf56-7eaf-11dc-8d7f-fa4c49c768cd}
Drive: D:\
Bootloader Path: \NST\nst_mac.mbr
Windows Directory:

Since there is no word left in the guides for EasyBCD to do something manually, I assume it will do everything required. But if there must be a path \NST with a file .mbr, which I suppose to be a Master Boot Record sector, where is it? There is none on the C: drive, nor on the Mac drive, of course. So

c) Why does EasyBCD set up the BCD for a file and path that does not exist? Or, at least, why it doesn't create the path and the file?

The result is the boot manager error we all know. There are no 3 seconds or something, as other members reported here. The boot manager instantly tells me the error after selecting the MacOS entry. Sure it will, because there is no \nst\nst_mac.mbr path and file on the target drive...
 
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Hi infiniter, welcome to NST.

EasyBCD creates a folder called NST on your boot drive. EasyBCD seems to have detected your boot drive as being drive D:, is that not the case?
 
It did not create a folder. C: is Windows XP, D: is Mac and E: is Vista, at boot stage.
Since the Vista MBR is installed, the boot manager of E: is called. After booting Vista, Vista is C: drive and Windows XP is D: drive. After booting Windows XP, it is vice versa.
I thought, for the Mac entry, I have to choose the drive where the Mac OS is installed. That'd be logical. When I chose "Auto configure" it uses drive D:, which is correct for the Mac partition. But on the boot drive there is no folder \NST.

The problem is, after the Vista bootloader is called, the partitions are reassigned. Because then the bootloader calls C: for Vista and D: for XP (as the boot data tells me in "View settings"), so the setting of D: as the bootdrive for Mac OS is wrong.

Update: I used boot drive C: instead of D: (what EasyBCD detected) and I set the the partition manually, so it could copy the boot block. But the path is not \NST on root of C:, it is C:\device\harddiskvolume5\nst\nst_mac.mbr. So the path in the BD data is still wrong and I have to copy the \NST folder manually to the root.
 
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I don't understand what's going on.

Can you please post EasyBCD | Diagnostics | Copy Debug Data here in a reply?
 
I will, if there is any. The two errors that EasyBCD has made, were using the wrong start drive for the automatic mode and creating a folder as described above. Not only \NST on root.
 
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