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Author Topic: [SOLVED] possible to boot WinXP from a GUID partitioned drive w/ Chameleon 2.0?  (Read 6224 times)

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rcfa

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The subject says it all, or better, asks it all ;)

Is there any way to boot WinXP from a GUID partitioned drive with Chameleon 2.0?

Right now, I have three partitions on my 500GB drive: EFI (reformatted to HFS+ with Chameleon on it), HFS+ with an (almost) vanilla install off of an original Apple Mac OS X 10.5.6 install DVD, and an NTFS partition with a WinXP installation.

Unfortunately, the latter won't boot, instead the WinXP boot screen flashes up for a second, and then I'm thrown back into the BIOS. Essentially, it seems like the WinXP booter doesn't understand the GUID partition scheme, and essentially ejects itself back into the arms of the BIOS, at least that's my suspicion.

Any precise explanation of what's going on, and even more so, ideas on how to fix this, are highly appreciated.

I should note that I'm likely going to spend 98% in Mac OS X, and 1% in WinXP (to read my car's service manual). The rest of the time I'll be staring at boot screens ;)
Since I want to retain a more or less factory install of Mac OS X and since I certainly don't want to go through the nightmare of reinstalling Mac OS X, reformatting to MBR is likely not an option.

I might try to use Apple's BootCamp, but I have the fear that'll screw up what I have now...
Hints? Solutions? Thanks!


Moderator Edit: Changed title to allow the extra characters needed to be marked as SOLVED. Nice work Ronald, this one answers a vfaq :).
« Last Edit: May 25, 2009, 07:17:05 PM by rocksteady »

distantstorm

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This is far from a solution, I would imagine XP doesn't like the GUID scheme either. I don't think BootCamp is an option with a Hackintosh. Since a reinstall is out the question and you only need XP for a limited task, I would probably use Fusion or Parallels to try to boot your XP partition from within OSX. I would imagine they will see it as a Boot Camp partition and it will work fine. Of course, given what you are using XP for there is also then the option of just deleting the XP partition altogether, giving more space to your OSX install and installing a virtual XP in Fusion. Should be plenty fast enough for what you seem to need it for,

Steve

rcfa

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Thanks for the suggestion. I thought of that, too. The problem is, this install is on an EeePC 1000HE, and while the 1.6GHz Atom chip performs admirably both when XP and Mac OS X run natively, given how poorly even my 2.4GHz MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM does running VirtualBox, Parallels or Fusion, I don't want to know how the performance of a 1.6GHz Atom with 2GB looks like...

The reason why I was wondering about BootCamp is this. Obviously BootCamp makes WinXP boot on a GUID partitioned disk. So the question is this: could it be that BootCamp installs a boot loader on the WinXP partition which allows Windows to properly deal with GUID partitions, once it tries to boot? Since Chameleon gets far enough to get Windows to start to boot (albeit the WinXP boot screen just flashes for a fraction of a second before it gives up and exits to the BIOS), the question is if at that point whatever BootCamp might install on the WinXP partition were to take over, then maybe the boot might succeed.

However, since I'm not exactly clear how BootCamp works, it's a bit of a gamble, so if anyone has some knowledge about how BootCamp manages to get WinXP to run that would be great...

distantstorm

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I'm wary of straying off the purpose of these boards since I don't think the solution is going to be Chameleon-based for you. As far as I know Bootcamp adds a sort-of BIOS layer to the Apple EFI. Chameleon is EFI emulator so it would have to emulate EFI, and also add in an emulation of that BIOS layer (which is going to be specific to Apple hardware) giving an emulation within an emulation (apologies to folk out there with far more technical knowledge!) As you can see it would get terribly complicated adding this support to Chameleon and generally BootCamp is redundant on Hackintoshes.

You are not going to like this but if it is GUID causing the issue then I think you will have to go down the MBR route. I'm pretty sure I have taken a Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper copy of my OSX partition installed on MBR and restored it to GUID so I would assume you can do it the other way too. That way you don't need to do an actual OSX install. You would obviously need to reinstall Chameleon and XP though. You could maybe try it on an external USB drive first. In fact, it's pretty handy to have a bootable external USB OSX anyway.

Steve

rcfa

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Well, my goal is to have a disk that can be swapped into a Mac and "just work", hence the entire contortion of doing a GUID disk with EFI partition, which works beautifully, because when I'm done figuring out all the dependencies, all the Hackintosh specific kext's will live outside the root file system, and out of reach of the regular. Mac OS X operations.

If there's no way of tricking XP into booting off a GUID partition, I may have to consider using Fusion, Parallels or VirtualBox. I still have hope. Maybe somone figures out how to backport some Win7 or Vista parts to XP to bypass that restriction or Chameleon figures out a similar trick as BootCamp to fool XP.

That OS X has priority can be seen in my partition sizes: 410GB vs. 63.6 ;)

ppg

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is this what you want?
guid/mbr hybrid installed http://www.vimeo.com/3307428

ppg

rcfa

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is this what you want?
guid/mbr hybrid installed http://www.vimeo.com/3307428

ppg

Except for the different hardware, that looks about right from the title. For some reason the video doesn't play, so I'll download and convert. I guess I'll see if there's enough info there to make things work.
Thanks for the pointer.

rcfa

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Just to say: this now all works. Incl. booting VMWare Fusion from the same WinXP partition.
My original attempt tried to restore a WinXP install with WinClone, but that install was somehow corrupted.
Installing WinXP from scratch seems to have cured the issues.

Partition tables now look as follows:
Code: [Select]
root# fdisk /dev/rdisk0
Disk: /dev/rdisk0 geometry: 60801/255/63 [976773168 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*1: EE    0   0   2 -  384  75  14 [         1 -     409639] <Unknown ID>
 2: AF  385   0   1 - 1023  75  14 [    409640 -  842555440] HFS+       
 3: 82 1023  75  14 - 1023  75  14 [ 842965080 -     262145] Linux swap 
 4: 07 1023  75  14 - 1023  75  14 [ 843227225 -  133540840] HPFS/QNX/AUX
root# gpt -r show /dev/rdisk0
gpt show: /dev/rdisk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0
      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         MBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2         32         Pri GPT table
         34          6         
         40     409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
     409640  842555440      2  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  842965080     262145      3  GPT part - 0657FD6D-A4AB-43C4-84E5-0933C84B4F4F
  843227225  133540840      4  GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7
  976768065       5070         
  976773135         32         Sec GPT table
  976773167          1         Sec GPT header

That linux swap partition has a volume label of .hidden which along with the partition type keeps it out of sight in both Mac OS X and WinXP.