27 July 2010

Finally Gave In

And LeMaurien19 is dual-booting 10.6.4 Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7 Professional on her HP Mini MacBook Pro 311.
image from zedomax.com
Not without some difficulties to hurdle first before things are finally settled on both sides. Good thing I didn't have to reinstall Snow Leopard from scratch and go through the trouble of updating everything. 

First, I had Carbon Copy Cloner back up my then current up to date 10.6.4 system to a .dmg file. 
Then booted off from a 10.6 Snow Leo installation on an external USB hard drive (used MultiBootISO with BootCD-altPS2.iso inside). 
Used Disk Utility to reformat and repartition my HP Mini 311's hard drive as GUID (GPT)
- 32 GB disk0s2 - for Windows 7
- 200 GB disk0s3 - for Mac OS X.
Used Carbon Copy Cloner again to restore the 10.6.4 .dmg back-up I created earlier onto the HP Mini 311's hard drive.
Installed Windows 7 - this entailed formatting the disk0s2 or partition 2 (EFI is partition 1 in the Windows world). For my part, being the obsessive compulsive me, I just had to make sure there weren't any nasty "unallocated space" between my Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6.4 partitions.
With Windows 7 installed and my default OS from then on, I restarted to boot into Mac OS X and installed HF6RC4.pkg.
Restarted the 311 to boot into Windows 7 installer and activated partition 3 using diskpart. Continued with "Repair Computer" option.
Restarted again to boot (again) into the Windows 7 installer and activated partition 1 EFI using diskpart.
VoilĂ . Chameleon now sees my Win 7 volume and boot into it.
My dual boot system is done!

Lesson: Chameleon is NOT able to see an NTFS formatted volume if it is not in disk0s2 or partition 2.

If anyone has found a way to force Windows 7 to install to a FAT32 volume (Chameleon recognizes disk0s3 if it is FAT32 or Mac OS X Journaled, just NOT NTFS), please speak up and enlighten us all :D

I'll update this post with pics and hopefully, update the HP Mini 311 Snow Leopard Installation Guide as well.

2 comments:

Mowgli said...

"Lesson: Chameleon is NOT able to see an NTFS formatted volume if it is not in disk0s2 or partition 2."

WRONG, Chameleon can see it and boot on it wherever it is !!!

The only thing to do is to use Diskutil to create a FAT partition on a GPT disk. Diskutil creates a „fake„ MBR that Windows accepts and then whether you need to reinstall Chameleon + repair Windows Boot with it's DVD, or just flag OS X/EFI partition with Chameleon on...

LeMaurien19 said...

^You mean
fdisk -e in Terminal?

But I've tried that, it won't budge...or maybe I'm doing it wrong?

Care to give more detailed how-to guide?

Merci d'avance!