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Mountain Lion / Windows 8 Dual Boot


Romano2K

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Hi there!

 

Now that Windows 8 RTM is available to developers or IT journalistes (which I am), I'm trying to install a Mountain Lion / Windows 8 dual boot on a spare drive, before doing it on my main hard drive.

 

Here is what I did to get it nearly working:

 

As Windows 8 is modern and should support GUID partition tables (also known as GPT) without messing with hybrid GPT/MBR partitions, but because I wasn't sure it would create such one instead of a MBR partition table, I first booted on a myHack Mountain Lion installation USB disk to partition the drive. Using Disk Utility, I created two partitions, the first in HFS+, the second in FAT32, with a GUID partition table.

 

But instead of lauching the installation right away, I shut down my computer and booted again with a Windows 8 installation disk. Once in front of the installer, I re-formated the FAT32 partition in NTFS and installed Windows 8. It rebooted fine.

 

Then I booted again with the Mountain Lion USB disk and installed it on the previously created HFS+ partition. It went fine.

 

 

But there's something wrong:

 

On boot, it displays "boot0: Done" for one second then loads Windows 8, instead of displaying the Chameleon | myHack bootloader.

 

If I boot on a myHack USB disk, I can choose the Mountain Lion partition and it boots.

 

How can I get rid of the USB disk and fix Chameleon on my hard drive ?

 

 

Thanks in advance! ;-)

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I finally took the opportunity of the Windows 8 launch to polish my dual boot installation.

 

The only thing I had to do to be able to choose OS X or Windows 8 at boot was to boot once using a myHack USB disk, then manually reinstall Chameleon on the harddrive. After that I get Chameleon on boot and both OS X and Windows 8 boot fine from there.

 

But, unfortunately, first automatic updates of Windows 8 broke everything.

 

After running Windows 8 for some time, it downloaded updates automatically (which is something I'd like to keep enabled) and installed them during the next shut down. Windows 8 still starts its boot sequence, but displays an error message which would be translated to something like: "Windows updates configuration failed. Restoring changes. Don't shutdown the computer." After sometime the computer reboots and if I choose Windows 8 again, it does this indefinitely.

 

post-374-13826558087899_thumb.jpeg

 

Any idea what's wrong? And how to fix it?

 

I already tried to reinstall Windows 8, as there wasn't anything essential installed or stored, but the same happened again.

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I once had a laptop that I setup for dual boot just the way you did. It wasn't too hard to do and it worked fine for a while. Then for some reason I couldn't explain, the partition table for Windows became corrupt and I lost everything on that side. This somewhat soured my attitude towards dual booting. If I was using a desktop and wanted a dual boot I would just use two hard drives and be done with it.

 

-MH

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