Contribute
Register

Chimera does not boot Windows 8

Status
Not open for further replies.
I recently figured this out.
The solution is to boot into legacy BIOS mode from the flash drive. Windows can then be installed on a partition.
In order to do this, look at the boot menu (from the bootloader, not from Chimera). The Windows flash drive will have two entries. One will begin with "UEFI" and the other one will begin with the beginning of the flash drive. Boot to the one that doesn't have "UEFI".

If you don't boot into the Windows installer from here, your install drive doesn't support legacy BIOS mode. To fix this, you need to write the Windows install image to the flash drive from a PC, using the official Microsoft installer.

Note that if you have no way of doing this it is still possible to install Windows on the entirety of your boot drive using UEFI mode. However you will be rendered unable to partition or install any OS other than Windows until you full wipe your boot disk again.

Hope this helps.
 
I recently figured this out.
The solution is to boot into legacy BIOS mode from the flash drive. Windows can then be installed on a partition.

Installing to a partition is not a problem for me, even in UEFI mode on my Maximus IV Gene-Z.
I can successfully boot from the partition as well prior to installing Mountain Lion.
However, once Mountain Lion has been installed and Chimera added via MultiBeast, I then never get an option to select Windows 8 as a boot option. I've also noticed that Mountain Lion shows my external NTFS formatted drive in folder, but doesn't list the Windows 8 formatted NTFS partition, like it did with the Windows 7 partition previously.

I'm guessing this is Chimera not able to see the device at boot and as such it's never presented to Mountain Lion.
 
I've managed to resolve my issue and Mountain Lion and Windows 8 are now both happily booting from Chimera.

My problem was that when I installed Windows 8 I removed the small 100Mb partition that preceded the Fat partition created by diskutility when I first set up dual boot with Windows 7. Once this was gone I could no longer see the windows disk from Mountain Lion or from Chimera.

Blitzed my system, re-partitioned the boot drive, installed Windows 8 (leaving additional partition in place), then restored Mountain Lion from a time machine backup and everything is now working perfectly.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top