I finally got around to tinkering with OSx86, and thanks to TonyMac and MacMan getting it installed and running flawlessly took about 35 minutes using their "iBoot" CD and single hard drive approach.
The headaches started when I tried to integrate the new separate OSX drive into my boot menus. "tboot" and "chain0" expect the boot block of drive0 to have been modified with a bootloader, so they never worked, and trying to use all of the different options available in EasyBCD 2.1 resulted in a message saying the HFS partition could not be found, or if I used the NeoGrub chameleon loader, my install would kernel-panic on boot.
The reason for the KP was that the version of Chameleon provided with EasyBCD is far too generic -- for a good hackintosh build to boot, the bootloader needs to be a lot more aware of the hardware. Loaders such as Chameleon, boot132 and PC EFI all require some form of pre-building to work correctly on anything but the most generic hardware configurations.
I didn't want to modify my drive0 boot sector with a loader like chameleon or G4D, nor did I want to use GPT or alter my existing partition layout on drive0 by adding an "EFI" partition to the beginning, as most dualboot tutorials seemed to insist on, so I was determined to get it into either the WinVista loader via a BCD editor such as EasyBCD, or added to the NTLDR dropthrough menu. I approached the latter first, using ISOemu, but I could not successfully get it to work with iBoot.
Because iBoot performed so flawlessly for the original setup, I decided to try using EasyBCD's boot-from-ISO mechanism, and added an entry to boot from a copy of the latest iboot.iso on the top level of drive0. Lo and behold, this worked.
The headaches started when I tried to integrate the new separate OSX drive into my boot menus. "tboot" and "chain0" expect the boot block of drive0 to have been modified with a bootloader, so they never worked, and trying to use all of the different options available in EasyBCD 2.1 resulted in a message saying the HFS partition could not be found, or if I used the NeoGrub chameleon loader, my install would kernel-panic on boot.
The reason for the KP was that the version of Chameleon provided with EasyBCD is far too generic -- for a good hackintosh build to boot, the bootloader needs to be a lot more aware of the hardware. Loaders such as Chameleon, boot132 and PC EFI all require some form of pre-building to work correctly on anything but the most generic hardware configurations.
I didn't want to modify my drive0 boot sector with a loader like chameleon or G4D, nor did I want to use GPT or alter my existing partition layout on drive0 by adding an "EFI" partition to the beginning, as most dualboot tutorials seemed to insist on, so I was determined to get it into either the WinVista loader via a BCD editor such as EasyBCD, or added to the NTLDR dropthrough menu. I approached the latter first, using ISOemu, but I could not successfully get it to work with iBoot.
Because iBoot performed so flawlessly for the original setup, I decided to try using EasyBCD's boot-from-ISO mechanism, and added an entry to boot from a copy of the latest iboot.iso on the top level of drive0. Lo and behold, this worked.
