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Old 05-24-2009, 01:54 AM
dorkboy dorkboy is offline
Cheetah
 
Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 5
Chameleon 2.0RC1 is coming along very nicely.

However, there is one issue that I ran into when using it to dual boot WinXP and Leopard on separate drives, so I thought I'd share the solution here.

Anyway, I installed RC1, and it gathered the information for all my bootable disks correctly, only upon reboot I'd select my WinXP NTFS partition and it would hang with a flashing cursor on a black screen.

Turns out that in order for WinXP to be dual-bootable in this fashion, it needs to be the selected boot drive in the BIOS... but to get to the Chameleon bootloader, the OSX drive must be selected as the boot drive in the BIOS. Quite the conundrum.

The solution turned out to be rather simple... make sure to include a small (or in my case, large) HFS+ partition on the same drive as your WinXP install, and install Chameleon to that drive. This satisfies the need for WinXP to be the default boot disk, and for Chameleon to control the boot process.

So to illustrate, my drive layout looks like this:
[DRIVE 1]: GUID - (600GB Leopard Install)
[DRIVE 2]: MBR - (100GB WinXP Install) - (350GB HFS+J Scratch Disk)

I installed Chameleon RC1 to the 350GB HFS+ partition on drive 2, and now it pops up as the 'default' disk in the chameleon bootloader screen, and the Leopard/WinXP disks are also both listed as bootable options. The nice thing is that since there is no bootable kernel on the scratch disk, Chameleon times out and defaults back to manual select mode, waiting for you to select which OS to boot from... so you can walk away from a reboot and not have to worry about being there to hit F12 at the appropriate moment.

Just my .02
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