Problems with selecting boot drive

[Barrister]

Okay, so since this is an OS X issue I doubt anyone can help me, but I'll throw it out there...

This week a new HDD and a new copy of Win 7 arrived.  My Mac Pro has 4 drive bays, and I've previously installed XP on a separate HDD, so I figured this'd be no problem to install a new drive with 7 on it.

I went through the Bootcamp Assistant, and saw that you would need to remove the lower numbered drive (with OS X on it) in order to install Win 7, so I did that.

But now, if I have the HDD with OS X in the machine I only get an error "Disk Error - Press Any Key to restart" - which does not sound like a Mac error to me.

If I only have the HDD with Win 7 in though, it boots straight to Win 7.

Any ideas?  I miss OS X already.

[Grey Fox]

When the Mac OS hdd is plug without the Win 7 hdd, what does happen?

Win 7 makes a 100mb partition, where is that partition?

[Barrister]

When the Mac OS hdd is plug without the Win 7 hdd, what does happen?

The error message mentioned above

Win 7 makes a 100mb partition, where is that partition?

How do I find that out?  I can only see one partition.

[Grey Fox]

I assume Mac Computer have the same kind of bios that PC have.

Whent he Mac OS hdd is the only one plugged in, what's the first boot device in the BIOS?


Under Windows : Control Panel -> System & Security -> System -> Device Manager -> Storage\Disk Management.

You might now have one, it doesn't seem to happen on all windows installation.

[Barrister]

Macs don't have BIOS - they use EFI.

I also don't see Storage/Disk Management under Device Manager.

[Grey Fox]

PC use EFI too, we just keep calling it BIOS.

That's not good.

[viper37]

I guess the new filters didn't work out very well

[viper37]

Okay, so since this is an OS X issue I doubt anyone can help me, but I'll throw it out there...

This week a new HDD and a new copy of Win 7 arrived.  My Mac Pro has 4 drive bays, and I've previously installed XP on a separate HDD, so I figured this'd be no problem to install a new drive with 7 on it.

I went through the Bootcamp Assistant, and saw that you would need to remove the lower numbered drive (with OS X on it) in order to install Win 7, so I did that.

But now, if I have the HDD with OS X in the machine I only get an error "Disk Error - Press Any Key to restart" - which does not sound like a Mac error to me.

If I only have the HDD with Win 7 in though, it boots straight to Win 7.

Any ideas?  I miss OS X already.

Windows does not play nice with other OS.
Basically, it takes control of your machine.  Windows must be installed first, than any other OS wich will replace Windows boot manager with their own.

What I don't get is how it affects your Mac OS X driver when it was not present during installation...

Check this tool:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/
You might be able to get back your OS X boot loader with it.
I've never tried it, so I can't really help you there

If that doesn't work, maybe consider reinstallation of OS X?  It should overwrite the Windows boot loader and let you dual boot correctly.  though I don't know if you lose data on your drive that way...

If you need to do backups before hand, check this thread:
http://languish.org/forums/index.php/topic,12484.0.html
follow the instructions to install a Linux distro, copy your files over to the Windows drive.

[Barrister]

You do realize you're rplying to a post from three and a half years ago, don't you? :p

[viper37]

You do realize you're rplying to a post from three and a half years ago, don't you? :p

duh!

I just saw this pop up and I replied

I guess you finally solved your problem after all these years