Bootloader Problem

[Aydinz]

i have Mac OS X installed on one of my HDD's and Windows XP installed on another, previously to switch from one OS to another i would just change the HDD boot order in bios, but i cant do this anymore, when i restored my OS X i had to install chameleon bootloader seperately and now this always comes up with only the OS X option no matter what my HDD Boot Order is. does anyone know how to fix this?

Cheers

[Aydinz]

does anyone know what's wrong? If my post is unclear please tell me what you don't understand and I will explain it in more detail.

Thanks

[milanca]

Not to go any deeper into the issue, probably when installing chameleon the boot sector on the second hdd got corrupted somehow for some reason.

HDD with OSX is booting fine so no reason to modify it. I would unplug that hdd leaving only the one with XP and boot with XP CD, to console mode, enter you admin pass and log to windows installation when promted.

Here you can do:

Fixmbr

and

Fixboot

After doing this it should be booting fine. You can plug in your osx hdd again. Other good solution is to add chain0 to windows xp boot.ini. This way you will have your xp hdd as first booting drive with an option to boot into osx. You won't need to change drives boot order every time.

Hope it helps.

[Voyn1x]

Did you actually restore to the correct drive...? :eek:

[Aydinz]

Thanks milanca. I'm at school right now. I will try this when I get home.i was going to try the chain0 solution but I can't edit the boot.ini via os x. Because the windows hdd is ntfs formatted.

LOL voyn1x I am 100% sure. Because when I login to OS X I can see the windows partition.

[Voyn1x]

Haha, I thought i'd help cover all possibilities :rolleyes:

[Aydinz]

sorry, but i have only been able to try this option out today because i have been very busy at school due to exams, i tried to use the fixmbr and fixboot commands, and they seemed to work but then whenever i boot up i get an error saying "MBR Error - Press any key to boot from floppy"

The only way i seem to be able to boot my XP system is to disconnect my OS X hard drive, put my Leo4All install disc in and when it counts down to 0 it cant find OS X on my system because i have unplugged it but it comes up with my XP system which i can boot from, i could live with doing this however there must be an easier way for XP to work without me having to pull out a HDD and load XP off the Leo4All Install Disc, if anyone has any suggestions i would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks

[nfoav8or]

try the boot flag /dev/diskX to change the disk you want to boot up... (X is the disk number when you run "diskutil list" from within Terminal

Otherwise I'm at a loss. I used to have to have my systems on the same drive but on separate partitions for these reasons... just so I could get the chain0 method or to just use the bootloader to select a separate partition.

[Dies]

Try SuperGrubDisk

http://www.supergrubdisk.org/

it has an option to restore the Windows bootloader.

Unplug the other drive just to be safe.

[Aydinz]

can you explain to me how this works? i dont quite understand. do i use the one that boots at start up or the one that is a .exe which i launch after i log into XP?

cheers

[Dies]

can you explain to me how this works? i dont quite understand. do i use the one that boots at start up or the one that is a .exe which i launch after i log into XP?

cheers

No, you want to DL the CD, Floppy or USB version. After burning it or installing it, you boot the machine from it and it will give you a menu of options, most of them regarding Linux but a few of them are Windows specific including one to re-install the Windows bootloader.

Don't know if it will help but since you already tried fixmbr and fixboot with no success, it might be worth a shot.