Probelm making chameleon default after installing Windows 10

[phoenixofstorm]

Hi all and Merry Christmas,
I really would need some help. As you can probably figure out from the title - I can't boot into chameleon (respectively my OSX Mavericks) because I decided to install Windows 10. Now some explaining is in order. All of the mentioned OSes are installed to my WD Passport Ultra external hard drive. My main OS is Linux Ubuntu 12.04. I use OSX mainly for work (audio) and Windows I intend to use for gaming and VR (as it has better support for my graphics card). Now what I did was creating several partitions on my external drive in the following order:
1. EFI partition for Windows - 500 MB.
2. NTFS partition for Windows
3. EXT4 partition for Linux 16.04 (which I haven't installed yet)
4. EFI partition (with a boot flag) for Mavericks - 200 MB
5. HFS+ partition for Mavericks
6 and 7 - Two ExFAT partition for keeping files.
Here's how I installed the systems - I already had my Mavericks on a SD card 64 GB, so I simply cloned it with Carbon Copy Cloner. I copied the EFI partition with GParted in Linux. After that was done I booted into it with my previous install and reinstalled Chameleon, which made my external drive bootable. Second I installed windows from a virtual machine using WinToUSB free by selecting my first and second partitions (the 1st EFI and the NTFS). All went well and now I have both systems working. However by default I can only boot in windows and for booting my OSX I need to use my SD card's install bootloader. Now, simple (I hope) question - how to fix this. I would like Chameleon to be my default bootloader (Chimera doesn't work for me, because it always gives me weird red letters on boot (regardless of the version). Is there a simple way to do it? Reinstalling Chameleon didn't help and as I'm not super advanced I'm out of ideas. I don't want to repeat the painful process of reinstalling everything again - it took me 2 days of fiddling with it.
Any help will be greatly appreciated!

 

[bmoag]

You must be awfully patient to run these OSes from an external drive.
Given how slow the interface is I wonder if you will be able to play games on Windows from an external drive on what I presume is a notebook.
In any event I do not think what you want to do is feasible from one drive and every time there is an OS update (particularly something on the order of the Win 10 Anniversary Update) your house of cards will likely fall.
If you must use external drives do yourself a favor and use separate drives for Windows and OSX, choosing the boot drive at startup. Linux can coexist with OSX or Windows but it is very difficult to maintain OSX and Windows on the same drive.
To my recollection, when I used to dual boot off one drive, Mavericks must be in the first partition of the drive so if that is no longer the case I would start there.
I hope you have a Mavericks USB key that lets you into your OSX installation or will let you start over.
I do not believe Chameleon is compatible with Windows EFI boot loading but should work with legacy boot for Windows--it did for me but that was with Win 7.
I believe your drive has to be structured with Mavericks first, then Windows, both booting in Legacy mood. I do not know if that is compatible with the machinations needed to get Windows to run from a USB device.
If you also have to have Linux (what can you do in Linux that you can't do in OSX or Windows with the hardware you seem to have?) why not run that in a virtual machine inside OSX or Windows?

 

[phoenixofstorm]

Thanks for the reply. You'd be surprised how fast it works - both windows and Mavericks. Now that I think about it, maybe you are right. However I don't want to deal with reformatting and moving partitions. I was hoping there's another way... Simpler way. The reason behind making Windows unfriendly for dual boot is beyond me. It completely overwrites the boot order and it doesn't see other systems (regardless if it's OSX or Linux). And to answer your question - I use Linux as my daily drive because it gives me full hardware compatibility and stability, while OSX doesn't support most of my hardware and Windows is unstable prone to virus infections OS. Also - I like Linux the best because it's free and it gives you the freedom to do whatever you like with it.
Anyway, if someone has any idea how to make Chameleon boot by default instead of the windows boot manager it'll be great. Because Chameleon allows me to choose from which drive to boot, which means I can boot into Windows, Linux or OSX - an option I don't get with the windows loader.