Triple boot not working

[snowbound]

I have a 1TB drive on which there is a XP partition (yes I know its deprecated) followed by a Windows 7 partition plus 2 other data partitions. There is no system reserved partition on this drive. On a separate partition there is Mavericks.

I have Chimera installed on the Mavericks with the Instant Menu option. When I select Windows7 partition I get BootMgr missing. The only way I can boot into Window7 is via the Bios F8 option to select the hard drive that has XP/Win7 on it.

Is there anyway of getting around the need to pressing F8 and instead use Chimera ?

 

[Going Bald]

I have a 1TB drive on which there is a XP partition (yes I know its deprecated) followed by a Windows 7 partition plus 2 other data partitions. There is no system reserved partition on this drive. On a separate partition there is Mavericks.

I have Chimera installed on the Mavericks with the Instant Menu option. When I select Windows7 partition I get BootMgr missing. The only way I can boot into Window7 is via the Bios F8 option to select the hard drive that has XP/Win7 on it.

Is there anyway of getting around the need to pressing F8 and instead use Chimera ?

One thing you can try, don't know if it still works or not, though.
Create a small partition at the end of your XP/Win7 drive and name it boot - only needs to be 100Mb or so in size. Copy the boot file and your /Extra folder to this partition from your OS X drive and delete them from your OS X drive.
Make the WinXP/Win7 drive first in HDD BBS boot order in BIOS.

 

[snowbound]

One thing you can try, don't know if it still works or not, though.
Create a small partition at the end of your XP/Win7 drive and name it boot - only needs to be 100Mb or so in size. Copy the boot file and your /Extra folder to this partition from your OS X drive and delete them from your OS X drive.
Make the WinXP/Win7 drive first in HDD BBS boot order in BIOS.

The boot file is the one at the root of the OS X drive? Is that moving the Chimera installed files over to the 1TB drive?

Just worried that if I delete anything from the OS X drive and it fails to boot then I may have problems getting back into the OS. Does this 100MB partition have to be HPFS+ or can it be NTFS? If NTFS does it have to be primary partition?

I checked in OS X and it shows that the 1 TB hard drive is a FDisk type drive.

 

[Going Bald]

There were a lot of threads back when people were trying to dual boot WinXP and SL.
Try reading http://www.tonymacx86.com/snow-leop...eopard-win-xp-two-separate-drives-darwin.html

You might also search key words WinXP dual boot - might turn up something.

 

[snowbound]

Well I tried creating a HPFS partition and installed Chimera over in it. The problem is that that managed to prevent windows from booting even without the OS X hard drive connected. It still showed Bootmgr missing. I had to boot with my Win7 Rescue Disk and fix the MBR.

Guess I will have to stick to using the BIOS boot option for this box.

 

[Going Bald]

Well I tried creating a HPFS partition and installed Chimera over in it. The problem is that that managed to prevent windows from booting even without the OS X hard drive connected. It still showed Bootmgr missing. I had to boot with my Win7 Rescue Disk and fix the MBR.

Guess I will have to stick to using the BIOS boot option for this box.

With Win7 and WinXP on same drive, why not just use the Win7 boot manager for booting XP instead of trying to boot it from Chimera?
Just add the XP to the Win7 BCD and when you boot up and want XP, select Win7 - takes you to the Win7 boot screen and you select WinXP. I know it is a round-about way of getting there, but it avoids the XP problem.

 

[snowbound]

That is already available but in order to boot XP/Win7 I have to remember to press F8 on power up of the machine select the 1TB drive with those OS on and then boot into the BootMgr screen and select either Win7 or XP. If I want to boot into Mavericks I have to do the same process but this time select the 2nd hard drive on which Mavericks is installed.

I just figured if I could have one integrated boot manager whose menu would show up when I power the machine up it would be simpler rather than using F8.

 

[Going Bald]

That is already available but in order to boot XP/Win7 I have to remember to press F8 on power up of the machine select the 1TB drive with those OS on and then boot into the BootMgr screen and select either Win7 or XP. If I want to boot into Mavericks I have to do the same process but this time select the 2nd hard drive on which Mavericks is installed.

I just figured if I could have one integrated boot manager whose menu would show up when I power the machine up it would be simpler rather than using F8.

If you use Instant Menu, the Win7 icon should be bootable without having to use function hotkey to select a drive unless you installed Win7 UEFI. Don't see how you could have, since XP will not run on EFI with GPT+ and Win7 does..

 

[snowbound]

If you use Instant Menu, the Win7 icon should be bootable without having to use function hotkey to select a drive unless you installed Win7 UEFI. Don't see how you could have, since XP will not run on EFI with GPT+ and Win7 does..

The 1TB drive with Windows is definitely not UEFI. It shows up as n FDisk in Maverick's partition info list. The drive does not have any system partitions at the beginning of the drive only XP and Win7 followed by two logical data partitions and a Mac OSx backup partition (so that backups are stored on different drive).

When I used Instant Menu I boot up OS X hard drive as first boot device I see an error saying "error encountered while starting up the computer pausing 5 seconds" after the 5 seconds the Chimera menu shows up with all the partitions on the 1TB drive as well as the partitions on the 2nd drive where Mavericks is installed.

I select the Win7 partition and get the BootMgr not found. Of course if I make Windows 7 first boot device I do not see the Chimera boot screen but rather normal Windows 7 bootmgr screen with Win7 or XP option.

 

[snowbound]

A bit of an update re this problem. I also have another hard drive that has Yosemite installed on it. I have either the Mavericks or the Yosemite drive powered up but not both at the same time. Tonight in Yosemite I used the right arrow key to display the other partitions other than Yosemite. I then selected the XP partition and lo and behold the normal bootmgr menu showing XP and Win7 showed up. Selecting Win7 boots Windows7 fine. XP though does not boot at all. That is minor since I do not use XP that much.

I figured lets add the Instant Menu and use the Hide Partition options. Once I did that I noticed two things happening.

1) Before the Chimera Instant Menu showed up I would see something quickly flash on the screen. I managed to snag a picture of the message. I did a chkdsk on each of the 4 NTS partitions on the 1TB drive where windows is installed but if found no problems.

2) On the Instant menu if I select Yosemite I see " Errors encountered while starting up the computer pausing for 5 seconds". Yosemite boots fine.

If I remove Hide Partition option out of the plist file the error shown in the screen shot goes away. If I remove Instant Menu and go back to the standard Timeout entry the error mentioned in 2) above disappears.

In Mavericks install, I tried both Instant Menu first and it showed the same error mentioned in 2) above. I then used the Hide Partition as well and the error mentioned in 2) disappeared but the warning mentioned in 1) flashed up.