Dual booting Windows 7 and OSX Lion on separate drives...

[feoZA]

OK so this morning I setup my machine as a Hackintosh with very little trouble. Everything seems to be working fine right now. I installed OSX Lion onto a spare 500GB HDD I had and I have my SSD with Windows 7 on it so I'm trying to dual boot.

Basically I read that I should set the OSX drive as the 1st boot device in the BIOS, which I did, but the bootloader thing doesn't see the Windows 7 drive. (when I ran MultiBeast though, I didn't check Chimera in the bootloader section, do I need to do that now?)

(I remember though, when I booted from the UniBeast USB for the 1st time when installing OSX Lion, it DID see the Windows drive, so I'm not sure why it doesn't see it now when booting directly from the HDD)

Help?

 

[feoZA]

Anyone please?!

OK maybe a bit more info would help.

I tried booting from my UniBeast USB drive and the Windows partition doesn't show up there.

Booting from my OSX drive is the same, it only gives the one option, to boot into the LION drive, it doesn't even see the Windows 7 drive.

I have no idea what I'm doing wrong here.

Any ideas PLEASE?

EDIT. In OSX Lion, Disk Utility sees the SSD that has Windows 7 on it if that makes any difference.

 

[ninetto]

Ummm... I hope you had your Windows drive unplugged when you installed LION, otherwise you might have to repair your Windows installation.

Also for booting from two different drives it has gotten tricker with the implementation of UEFI and Windows 7 on GPT-formated drives. Read this post and check "Going Bald" guide to multi-booting, he is the God of that subject:

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=64174&p=400067#p400067

Myself, I am lazy so if your windows installation is in order, just do like me and hit the F12 at POST, pick the windows drive. Not elegant but never fails and no new re-installations necessary.

 

[thelostswede]

F12 only works on Gigabyte boards, but I would hope that MSI has something similar which allows you to manually chose which drive you want to boot from. There should be a prompt at the POST screen that should inform you of which key to press on the keyboard for this. It's by far the easiest way to dual boot.

 

[jester969]

Did you run the AHCI fix on the Windows SSD?

Read here...

Single/Dual/Triple Booting Guide on one or separate HDDs/SSDs by GoingBald

viewtopic.php?f=81&t=20872

 

[feoZA]

Ummm... I hope you had your Windows drive unplugged when you installed LION, otherwise you might have to repair your Windows installation.

Also for booting from two different drives it has gotten tricker with the implementation of UEFI and Windows 7 on GPT-formated drives. Read this post and check "Going Bald" guide to multi-booting, he is the God of that subject:

https://tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f= ... 67#p400067

Myself, I am lazy so if your windows installation is in order, just do like me and hit the F12 at POST, pick the windows drive. Not elegant but never fails and no new re-installations necessary.

Yes the Windows 7 drive was disconnected when doing the Lion install.

What I don't get is that when booted from the UniBeast USB for the 1st time, I saw it gave the Windows 7 option at the boot loader screen, but now whether I boot from the Lion drive or USB, it just doesn't find the Windows 7 drive.

I take it all the articles and posts about making the Windows 7 drive the "active partition" only applies when installing OSX and Windows 7 to different partitions on the SAME drive, correct?

Any ideas what I can try now?

I'm gonna use the standalone installer for Chimera 1.10.0 and see if that works. Currently I'm using Chimera 1.9.something from MultiBeast.

Another thing, my Windows 7 install was cloned onto my SSD from an HDD, and I had to do the registry hack thing to boot into Windows 7 after enabling AHCI in the BIOS. I didn't actually install Windows 7 to the SSD in an AHCI environment. Would that make a difference?

 

[feoZA]

Also, one more thing, when I boot into OSX I get a message that says "The disk you inserted is not readable by this computer" and gives 3 options: Initialize, Eject and Ignore.

I'm pretty sure this refers to the SSD drive with Windows 7 on it.

I'm not sure what to do next if I click Initialize. I'm hesitant because if I accidentally wipe the Windows 7 drive I'm screwed. Do you guys think I should try the "Repair Disk" option?

 

[ninetto]

Sorry to say it does not sound pretty for your Windows install.
If Apple is giving you that message there is something wrong with the MBR of your Windows drive.
"Initialize" is Apple's word for "format" which will wipe the data on your Windows drive.

Do not try to repair NFTS-drives in OSX.
You have to turn to other tools, first in mind is using the Windows install disk to repair the windows bootloader.

 

[feoZA]

Sorry to say it does not sound pretty for your Windows install.
If Apple is giving you that message there is something wrong with the MBR of your Windows drive.
"Initialize" is Apple's word for "format" which will wipe the data on your Windows drive.

Do not try to repair NFTS-drives in OSX.
You have to turn to other tools, first in mind is using the Windows install disk to repair the windows bootloader.

But my Windows 7 drive boots up perfectly well if I set it to a higher boot priority than than the OSX drive in the BIOS.

But I'll try to the repair the MBR next.

 

[Asus-Freak]

Did you not read "thelostswede" post? Select your boot drive using the motherboards "Boot Optins" key. F12 for Gigabyte, F8 for Asus, and I think "ESC" for MSI but I'm not sure 'bout that. Check your motherboard manual or website...