MediaDirect button + XP + Leopard = Dual-Boot :) - InsanelyMac Forum

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UPDATE: Brave yeye managed to dual-boot Mac OSX and Vista. See further posts below. Further additions: It is advisable to use MediaDirect button for booting Leo, and Power button for booting XP or Vista. Sonotone reported that otherwise Leo may not see your NTFS partition. Theanine says: "I used the HxD and Ubuntu to update the 75 to 74 partition values as neither the cracked Acronis Disk Director nor the Paragon Partition Manger would allow me to edit the partition". the great deceiver informs of another way of using MD button. See his post below, although it is suitable more of initial installation, when you are installing everything from scratch.

NOTE: This guide is in its experimental form yet, and the proposed modifications are not suitable for everyone. If you are unsure of your skills, don't attempt it! Since I have MediaDirect 3.5 on my laptop, these modifications should work for other DELLs with MD version 3.5. Nevertheless, they may also work on earlier versions, e.g . 3.3. Those users that have MediaDirect 2 or 1 installed should not attempt to follow this guide - it may just brick their laptops!

My configuration: DELL Vostro 1500, which came with latest Mediadirect reinstall disc, version 3.5 Before starting installation, I wiped all partitions on laptop's HD, which were preinstalled on it. Then I installed a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP reinstall disc, which came with my Vostro, and Leopard's release "iAtkos ir2". I used MBR and EFI. This configuration was already working fine before I began the following modifications. Tools I used: Acronis Disk Director Ubuntu Live CD MacDrive DELL MediaDirect reinstall disk Note: one may use less tools for the following operations. For example, I'm sure that Ubuntu Live CD can replace both Acronis and MacDrive.

A little theory: sometime ago was proposed a solution on how to dual boot ubuntu and XP/Vista. For details see: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=231747 and http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=182495 These solutions won't work with Leopard - MediaDirect during boot does something strange to the partition table in MBR, so one cannot have a dual-boot with Leopard after that: always after reboot the loader displays a nasty "HFS+ partition error". Below I describe how to eliminate this error.

I used these two guides (see links above) as a reference. Since I had already installed both Leopard and XP, I went directly to the point where one has to run RMBR.EXE program from DELL MediaDirect reinstall disk. --------------------------------------------------BEFORE RUNNING RMBR.EXE, IT IS IMPORTANT TO MAKE BACKUP OF YOUR MASTER BOOT RECORD (MBR). I used for this purpose Ubuntu Live CD. You can easily download it from the Ubuntu website. After starting Live CD in no-installation-mode, start Partitioning Tool to inspect your drives. Make sure that you connect either flash disk or any other disk, on which you can backup your MBR. Don't backup MBR on the same disk, which is in your notebook! Use another one. After inspecting your devices, run terminal and type: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/backup/backup.mbr bs=512 count=1

In this example /dev/sda stands for the internal HD of my laptop, and /media/backup for the external usb drive, whose volume name is "backup". Please change these two values, so that they will correspond to your configuration as reported by Partitioning Tool. After running this command, it will create a file backup.mbr on your external disk, which size will be 512 byte. If you break your MBR, you can easily recover it from the same Ubuntu Live CD by running in terminal: sudo dd if=/media/backup/backup.mbr of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 After executing this command your MBR should be restored.

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09-Nov-10

MediaDirect button + XP + Leopard = Dual-Boot :) - InsanelyMac Forum

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---------------------------------------------------Because I had two partitions on my HD 1. 2. HFS+ partition with Leopard, NTFS partition with Win XP,

and I wanted to use power button for starting XP, and MediaDirect button for starting Leopard, I typed in command line in Win XP: E:\dellkit\rmbr.exe DELL 2 1 The first argument ("2") stands for the number of Win XP partition, while the second argument ("1") stands for the number of Leopard partition. You should put here your appropriate values. On program execution a MBR is modified and then one can shutdown the laptop. After power up the following should be observed: 1. If you press "Power" button, the Win XP should start to load. 2. If you press "MediaDirect" button, the logo starts to show MediaDirect screen and then will write "HFS+ partition error". Note that these two points are valid if you assigned your partitions the way I did it: the first number in RMBR.EXE program is for XP partition, the second one for the Leopard partition. At this point you can still revert your MBR by using its restore procedure, described above (see text in blue). Now get prepared for some hacking. Use MacDrive to mount your Leopard partition (after installing MacDrive, it should mount it automatically). Run Acronis Disk Editor. (I guess that it is possible to do the following operations via Ubuntu Live CD only, without Acronis DD and MacDrive). Open in Disk Editor partition with Leopard. The first thing that you will see should be boot record, located in the beginning of Leopard partition. Its size is also 512 bytes. Check if you have the following hexadecimal numbers in place:
CODE

seg000:0000 seg000:0010

FA 31 C0 8E D0 BC F0 FF 66 A3 00 E4 80 7C 04 AF

FB 8E C0 8E D8 66 31 C0 75 03 E9 09 00 BE 03 7D

If you have, you can proceed further. Now, change the value 75 (shown below in red) to the value 74.

QUOTE

seg000:0010 66 A3 00 E4 80 7C 04 AF 75 03 E9 09 00 BE 03 7D

Don't change anything else! Save the sector to disk. Exit program. Job's done! Now you are ready to restart computer, and check if you have a dual-boot with MediaDirect button and Power button. Further mod: if you want to skip a 5-second delay in Darwin bootloader, modify com.apple.Boot.plist file (located in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration): Replace
CODE

<key>Quiet Boot</key> <string>No</string> <key>Timeout</key> <string>5</string>

with

CODE

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MediaDirect button + XP + Leopard = Dual-Boot :) - InsanelyMac Forum

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<key>Quiet Boot</key> <string>Yes</string> <key>Timeout</key> <string>0</string>

Appendix
Here I give brief info on why we do the modifications described above. You may skip it - everything that should be done is listed above. This patching changes the initial code of boot1h loader, which is located in the very beginning of Leopard partition:

CODE

seg000:0000 sub_0 seg000:0000 seg000:0001 seg000:0003 seg000:0005 seg000:0008 seg000:0009 seg000:000B seg000:000D seg000:0010 seg000:0014 seg000:0018 seg000:001A

proc near cli xor mov mov sti mov mov xor mov cmp jnz jmp es, ax ds, ax eax, eax ds:0E400h, eax byte ptr [si+4], 0AFh; "identification number of HFS+ active partition"(?) short loc_1D loc_26 ; "if number from our partition doesn't coincide with AF, a ; "if number from partition coincides, the next loader ax, ax ss, ax sp, 0FFF0h

message is displayed HFS+ partiton error" and then system halts. in chain is loaded (boot2)"

What we do here is that we change

jnz short loc_1D to

jz short loc_1D

so even if we didn't flagged Leopard partition as active, this loader (boot1h) will still boot Darwin bootloader, which in turn will boot Leopard. Yes, I know that this is rather crude solution to the problem It is a quick fix, which can be enhanced later. Comments, corrections and suggestions are welcome!

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09-Nov-10