Dual boot Vista and OSX on HP Laptop

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Dual boot Vista and OSX on HP Laptop

Posted on 04 Aug 2009 14:01 under osx tips-&-tricks

Disclaimer: Installing Mac OSX on non-apple hardware is illegal. This post is just for educational purpose.

My laptop configuration:

HP Laptop dv6000t
Processor: Intel Core Duo CPU T2450 @ 2.00 GHz
Memory (RAM): 1GB
Audio: Conexant High Definition Audio
Display: Mobile Intel(R) 945 Express Chipset Family
Network: Intel(R) PRO/100 VE Network Connection (Ethernet), Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection

What you need

iATKOS Mac OSx86 DVD

You will need to get hold of iATKOS DVD. You can find it at usual places. I used iATKOS v 7.0. Download the disk image and burn the DVD.

Windows Vista DVD

You will need it to repair Windows Vista startup. If you have Windows Vista DVD (system recovery disk) which came with your laptop, it won't work. You need a bootable Windows Vista Disk.

chain0 file

You will need this file to make your PC dual bootable. Click here to download this file.

Procedure

Prepare a Partition

You will need to configure a partition on which you will install Mac OSX. If you already have a partition, you are good to go. If you don't have one, you need to create it. You can do so by resizing an existing partition. Various posts mentions using Windows Disk Management for doing it. You can also try this. Right click my computer, click "Properties", Click "Device Manager"on left pane, Click "Disk Management". This will show all the existing partitions. Right click the target partition and click "Shrink Volume". You can select the amount of space to free and click OK.

However I found Disk Management of Windows pretty crappy because it almost always didn't allow me to free space even when there is plenty of space left on hard disk. This is because Windows only lets you shrink the largest continuous chunk of free space.

This is where I found EASEUS extremely useful. The free home edition works just fine. It has a similar interface as Windows Disk Management, so you can create the partition using it very easily.

Format the partition as NTFS and apply the volume label "OSX".

Installing OSX

Insert the DVD in the tray and boot your computer from it. You may need to change your boot order if your computer doesn't boot correctly.
Press F8 as the count down begins and type -v at the prompt and hit enter. This will make the startup verbose so that you can see the startup messages.
After a while you should be looking at the leopard installer. Follow the on screen instructions.
Once the loading bar vanishes, select Utilities > Disk Utility.
Select the volume "OSX" which you created previously and format it as MAC OSX Journaled Extended.
Now get back to the Leopard install screen. Choose the partition which you just formatted.
Customise the installation option and:
- Unselect
  - Chamleon boot loader (We will be using Windows boot manager so we don't need it)
- Select
  - Intel EFI String
  - GMA 950 for Laptop
  - Apple PS2 Drivers
Continue the installation. It will take a while so you can have a coffee.

Making it dual bootable

Once the installation is done, reboot with the DVD in the drive. Press F8 at Darwin boot loader and type -s and press enter.
Execute the following commands:

fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
flag 1
quit
reboot

Now before the PC starts, remove the DVD. You will not be able to boot into Vista and instead get an error "winload.exe is corrupt"
Now insert the Vista bootable disk in the drive and reboot from DVD. Click on "Repair computer" once you are inside the DVD and it will automatically detect if a problem exists and suggest "Repair and Restart". Press the same and remove the DVD once the PC is about to restart. You should now be able to log in to vista without any problem.
Boot into Vista. Copy the chain0 file to C:
Open the command prompt with elevated admin privileges from the start menu.
Type the following into the prompt

bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Mac OS X"
bcdedit /enum active
bcdedit /set {GUID} PATH \chain0

In the first command type {current} as it is, literally..nothing else. Just {current} with the curly brackets. In the third command replace the GUID with the alphanumeric GUID you see against "Identifier" for Mac OSX. You will see this as soon as you enter the second command.

Now again give command "bcdedit /enum active" and confirm that you have Mac OSX correctly configured. It must look something like:

Windows Boot Loader

identifier {e94e2940-68da-11de-b9a9-8cf8abd2fc0f}
device partition=C:
path \chain0
description Mac OS X
recoverysequence {572bcd55-ffa7-11d9-aae2-0007e994107d}
recoveryenabled Yes
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {17cbdd92-6953-11de-909d-806e6f6e6963}

Close the command prompt and restart your laptop.
You should be looking at the screen with two options to boot into Mac OSX or Vista. Select the operating system you want to boot into. Hurray!!!