dual boot on separate HDDs without fiddling with bios settings?
 

HI. wondering if anyone can help me.

I have Vista in 1 HD and OS X (iATKOS v5i updated to 10.5.8) in a separate HD (not a partition), how can i dual boot?

so far, i've been going into bios and change my SATA settings before i can boot into one or the other OS. I've tried chameleon RC2 but no luck. when the screen flashes up, when i tried to choose either OSs i'd get an error.....can't remember what the error is atm, 'til i fiddle with bios then it would boot in the selected os properly. maybe i have to tweak my chameleon? change certain setups in the bios to work properly with chameleon? any fixes/patches i can apply?

any ideas? please help.

I have an HP m9250f.

thanx.

katie d.

Fiddle in the BIOS again and set your OSX HDD to boot first. If you have Chameleon in there it usually ask you which OS you would like to boot.

Maybe you have some weird partition layout in your vista hd and chameleon is not working well with it.

Try use the repair function in the installation disk you have and go to command prompt,
then type this commands:
diskpart
select disk X <----- Osx and vista installed disk.
select partition X <----- Vista partition.
active
exit
bootrec /rebuildbcd

then boot to your windows vista and install EasyBCD and add the MACOSX to your boot...

Yes, i do have my BIOS to boot into OS X. but still doesn't work.

the hp m9250f came with 2 HDDs and one of them is partitioned for Recovery disc. I purchased a 3rd HDD to put OS X in.

if the partition is the problem that chameleon doesn't work well, what can i do?

thanx.

kate d

Are you sure its not a Recovery partition? Somehow I find it weird HP is putting whole disks in their systems just for Recovery. You can get a low level report of partitions with "diskutil list" in Terminal.
If you have a foreign partition and Chameleon thinks thats Vista maybe thats why it doesnt work, or maybe Vista boot files are in that partition.

sorry, i don't know much about PC but I believe you are right that it's a Recovery partition. all i know is that the system came with 2 500G HDDs, and i notice that there's a recovery partition so i assume that it's probably a partition from one of the 500GBs and most likely the Main one where Vista was installed.

so, what can i do from there if there's anything i can do.

thanx

kd

If you have 2 500Gb HDs they could be set up as RAID array, maybe thats why Chameleon is not letting you boot Vista from there.
Without knowing how your system has the partitions and disks set up it would be hard for anyone to know whats going wrong and how to fix it...

Did you try the EasyBCD and add the MACOSX boot option???