Right now I have Windows 7 installed on 1 of 2 drives on a g31m-e2sl rev.2 based system (yep, incompatible ethernet). I'd like to do a vanilla install of Snow Leopard on the other drive ( I bought the retail DVD ), preferably without having to install 10.5.x first. If that's not the best route I have a leopard disc (10.5.6 retail) I can install first. My first attempt at installing SL failed after following this tutorial. I was able to install SL from a thumb drive, but it failed to boot after I installed Chameleon ( I was getting a nice 'You need to restart your computer' osx message part way into the boot followed by a 'CMOS checksum error' from my BIOS.). After all of this I wasn't able to boot into Windows 7 because the bootloader was clearly overwritten by chameleon and for some reason I was unable to repair it within Windows 7's recovery console. I ultimately had to wipe out both partitions with a 'clean all' recovery console command and did a re-install of Windows 7. So now I'm back to square one. What's the best way to get Snow Leopard and Windows 7 living in harmony? Is Chameleon absolutely imperitive for OSX to function or can I use something like easyBCD instead?
My next step was to follow this tutorial ( it involves chameleon, yet again) but I thought I'd drop in and see if anyone had any better solutions for my particular case.
My specs are as follows (just in case i've overlooked some other hardware imcompatibilities):

Gigabyte g31m-e2sl rev.2
EVGA 9800 GTX 512 vram
CPU INTEL|C2D E7500 2.93G 45N R
2Gx2|CORSAIR TWIN2X4096-8500C5C

Thanks!

I guess I don't quite understand your problem.

You have 2 drives so why not install OSX on 1 drive and Win 7 on the other?

I have each OS on different drives with the OSX Chamelon booting first for where I can choose the Win 7 OS if necessary.

I found that to prevent 'errors' disconnect the Win 7 drive while you're setting up Chameleon/OSX.

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Gigabyte EX58-UD5 - i7 920 @ 3.2 GHx - eVGA 8800GT
Asus P5Q Deluxe - E8400 @ 3.6 GHz - Asus 7900GT
iMac 2.2 GHz - 4 MB

http://www.infinitemac.com/f57/guide...672/page7.html

Had to do some digging to find out how to install from scratch on same board without leopard. See post on the above link for how to install on 2nd drive.

I guess what I was looking for was more of a step-by-step process for the dual boot setup. The tutorial I followed and the one I plan to next don't assume you want to dual-boot. If I were to install osx again with the chameleon boot loader how do I then add windows 7 to chameleon as a choice? Also, do you think the errors I received before have anything to do w\ the fact that I installed Snow Leopard without having a version of Leopard installed first?

I'd prefer to not touch Windows partition. Windows bootloader just hates to be disturbed.

Just install Win7 to primary disk and osx to the second. This way both os will be installed to different mbr. Then just use easybcd and you will be able to choose Win7 or Chameleon on boot. Easy.

ps. One downside, I think you will be restricted to mbr partition scheme. I've never tried guid tho.

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Core2Quad / MSI P45 Neo2-FR / HD4870 / Snow Leopard

If you have OSX running on one drive, disconnect it, hook up the other drive and install Win 7. After installation, hook up both drives, go into BIOS and have the OSX drive as the bootable drive.

When you bootup, Cham boots. If you want Win 7, at that point you press the space bar and a list of drives pops up from which you can chose your Win 7 install.

You don't need to "add" the Win 7 drive to Cham. Cham will recoginze all the drives and partitions you have.

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Gigabyte EX58-UD5 - i7 920 @ 3.2 GHx - eVGA 8800GT
Asus P5Q Deluxe - E8400 @ 3.6 GHz - Asus 7900GT
iMac 2.2 GHz - 4 MB

All I did to get my multi-boot working was simply install OS X [with an existing windows partiton already there], then boot with the Windows install disc and repair the boot record with command prompt [if I couldn't get right into Windows after that boot]. Then I just used EasyBCD to point it to OS X and add OS X to the boot record. On next boot, I just select the OS X line I added, and let Chameleon load and boot into OS X.

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GPU: EVGA 9800GX2 Sapphire 5870
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz @ 3.00GHz
RAM: 6GB DDR2 800 Corsair XMS2
MOBO: EVGA 780i SLI XFX 750i
OS's: Windows 7 Professional x64, Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx x64
Virtual OS's: OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.4, Android EEE PC HDD clone, Jolicloud

You can get Atheros AR5007 running by editing the com.apple.Boot.plist file (or whatever it is) and adding "arch=x86_32" to the kernel flags.

I've got Snow Leopard and everything running now on my HP Pavillion Elite m9180f (using this kernel flag and running 32 bit mode), and the only thing not working without it (in 64-bit mode) is my Wifi.

As soon as I can get my hands on a 64-bit kext for the Atheros AR5007 I'll be in business....