blog.blackrobes.net » bootcamp http://blog.blackrobes.net more personal stuff Thu, 31 Dec 2009 02:08:00 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 BootCampin’ the night away http://blog.blackrobes.net/2009/06/bootcampin-the-night-away/ http://blog.blackrobes.net/2009/06/bootcampin-the-night-away/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:36:03 +0000 loyd http://blog.blackrobes.net/?p=76 With my latest hard drive swap, I wanted to bring BootCamp back into my life. Previously I created a custom XP install disc with USB support, which I used to boot Windows from an external USB hard drive. (See the Resources section at the end of this article.) Tech specs: BootCamp partition was the smallest allowed size (about 5GB), and Windows XP SP2 (at the time) installed on a 60GB Western Digital Passport drive (model WD600U017-000). The hardest part was creating the XP disc. The drive booted Windows perfectly, and I had no problem loading the BootCamp drivers, even those for USB chipset support.

The past year or so, I’ve not used BootCamp because I did not know how to transfer the BootCamp partition to my new hard drive load. By default, OS X can read from, but not write to, NTFS partitions.

Enter Winclone, a free utility to backup and restore BootCamp partitions. It creates a backup image of your partition, which you can copy to other Macs and restore. (Kids, stay legal!) I whipped out my original MBP hard drive, hooked it to my trusty SATA dock, and ripped the BootCamp image. Because Windows was not installed in BootCamp, my image file was 1.4MB; that’s right, it could fit on a floppy disk!

Flush with excitement, I created a fresh BootCamp parition on my new hard drive and restored it with Winclone. Hooked up the external drive, reboot, select “Windows” from the boot screen. Fail! The USB drive flashed and posted this error message:

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.
Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

To understand how Windows finds the XP install, the boot loader looks in file boot.ini on the boot drive. (The boot drive and the system drive / partition can be different.) This error indicates it could found and read boot.ini, but could not find the Windows install. Fortunately, boot.ini is on the internal BootCamp parition and reviewing it showed:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

The interesting bits are on lines 3 and 5; specifically, partition(3). I theorized that perhaps partition 3 was not valid in my new install, that it should be partition 1 instead. So I downloaded NTFS-3G for OS X (see below for the link), and edited boot.ini, changing the two lines from partition(3) to partition (1):

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Et voilà, the next reboot was a success!

Resources:

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