OSX/Vista/Ubuntu on Powerbook with EasyBCD 1.7

J

jongor

Member
Hi-
Hope I can get some help with this.

I have a newly purchased Mac PB (Santa Rosa) and am having trouble booting into OS X (Leopard) as a part of a triple boot of OSX/Vista/Ubuntu. Vista and Ubuntu boot fine.

I'm using BCD 1.7 and have tried creating entries on the Mac tab for both iBook/Macbook and Generic x86 PC (figured I should try) but have had no success.

When I select the entry at boot time, I receive an error stating "Windows failed to start", "selected entry could not be loaded" etc. and on clicking Enter I'm returned to the boot screen.

I followed the instructions in the forum for copying over my boot.efi from OS X, btw.

Help is much appreciated!
 
With the Macs cant you just use BootCamp? That would be your best way to go between OS X and Vista. Since EasyBCD only control the Vista bootloader and can only be used from within Vista.

Other than that it seems like the boot info is missing for Vista.
 
Hi Makaveli213-
Thanks for the reply.

Actually, I am using BootCamp to dual boot OSX/Vista but I am using BCD 1.7 to (in effect) dual boot Vista/Ubuntu. I wanted to use BCD to also boot OSX so that I can (in effect) triple boot OSX/Vista/Ubuntu. BootCamp will only dual boot. I tried using rEFit from MacOSx, btw but was unsuccessful getting Ubuntu to work with it.

Make sense?
 
Yes that makes sense. When you installed Ubuntu did you isntall GRUB to the Boot drive? If so wouldnt that in effect be the Apple drive which would cause the BCD not to work to boot Ubuntu since Vista can not read that file system.

So you might be able to add a entry with NeoGRUB and when you add the Linux Entry make sure that the GRUB was not installed box is checked.

NeoGrub - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki

There is all teh documentation on NeoGRUB.
 
Ubuntu actually boots fine with BCD (Drive: Active Boot Partion, Bootloader Path: \NST\NeoGrub.mbr). It's OSX that won't boot. Sorry for the confusion.

Can I use NeoGrub to also get OSX to boot?

Just guessing...
 
Yeah. Saw that page before. It appears to be the docs for a previous version of BCD and doesn't include steps for BCD 1.7 - the UI has changed in the latest version. Guess I'll have to wait for the guru...

Thanks!
 
Hi jongor,

I'm afraid it's not possible to use both BootCamp and have EasyBCD boot into OS X.

I'll have to update the documentation (I know, it's kinda stale) but basically it'll never work if you're also using BootCamp because BootCamp hides everything OS X from the BootCamp'd operating systems.

Only solution is to install Vista natively on your Mac, then set up the dual-boot with EasyBCD.

We really don't recommend doing that, it can seriously screw up your PC because Vista doesn't play well with Macintel EFI low-level setup.
 
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