Nobody told me Lion won't install when there's a Bootcamp partition. What now?

I have the converse problem:

I've had Windows XP SP3 working just fine on a Bootcamp partition since I bought my MacBook Pro in January.

I've been running Parallels without a hitch.

I installed LION yesterday on my MacBook without trouble. Today, I tried to run Parallels and do something in Windows. But, while parallels starts OK, Windows won't bot anymore.

Even trying to start Windows at system startup using the option key doesn't work.

ANyone got a fix?

Try starting windows in safe mode.

option key as before then press F8 as soon as you selected boot from bootcamp

Robin,

No can do. Holding "option" key while cold staarting laptop does not provide any options! THe machine boots directly into LION.

Parallels starts, and I get the "My Bootcamp" window. Clicking the start windows button results in the message below:

I tried using disk utility to repair & verify the disk:

I can see all the files on the disk in Fionder. The Bootcamp icon remains on my desktop.

I tried executing "Notepad" from the system folder. WHen I do, I get a message that I'm openng it for the first time and then get to the Parallels Desktop window again with the same results.

I believe you should get the boot disk selector even if you only have one bootable volume. Wait until the startup chime sounds and then press and hold the Option key.

You might try these posts to see if you can recover the BootCamp volume:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2746125?answerId=15650137022#15650137022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3204350?answerId=15714635022#15714635022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3199099

I am not sure if all of these post assume you have Windows7 or not. I restricted my search to just the past week. You may be able to find more information by searching these forums for "fixmbr" or "MBR" or you can follow-up with the posters of the above postings to see if they can provide more details.

Extra reading material: http://www.ntfs.com/mbr-damaged.htm

Thank you Mr. Jones.

We're making progress.

Following one of your suggestions, I inserted the XP install CD and restaredt my laptop: waiting for the chime then pressing the option key I indeed get a choice of boot options including the CD.

Not sure how I did it but, I can now boot to Windows XP from the Bootcamp disk. It seems in perfect condition with all my files and pregrams still intact.

However,

If I boot into Lion, then start Parallels (with all current updates as of yesterday) I get the same message (follow the thread up) indicating that there is a "disk hardware configuration problem".

Restarting & booting into the "HD Recovery" disk, running through the repair & verify, it doesn't seem to change.

It's looking like the issue may be with Parallels & Lion - not Bootcamp & Lion.

I had some problems with my Parallels BootCamp VM as well. I ended up removing the original one and recreating it. It seems to be working now.

How can the partition table be prepared for Windows with gdisk (GPT fdisk) instead of Boot Camp Assistant? Maybe d3vi1 could shed some light on this?

Problem: Windows HD (NTFS, with XP Pro SP2, restored from drive image) doesn't show up on alt-boot, and if chosen in system preferences, boot up ends at blinking cursor.

History: Partition scheme made hybrid with gdisk. All looks fine:

Partition table scan:

MBR: hybrid

BSD: not present

APM: not present

GPT: present

Found valid GPT with hybrid MBR; using GPT.

Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name

1 40 409639 200.0 MiB EF00 EFI System Partition

2 409640 326475791 155.5 GiB AF00 Lion HD

3 326475792 327745327 619.9 MiB AB00 Recovery HD

4 327745328 726511023 190.1 GiB AF00 Macintosh HD

5 726773760 976773119 119.2 GiB 0700 WINDOWS HD

Disk size is 976773168 sectors (465.8 GiB)

MBR disk identifier: 0x41B241B1

MBR partitions:

Number Boot Start Sector End Sector Status Code

1 1 726773759 primary 0xEE

2 * 726773760 976773119 primary 0x07

Disk Utility says the partition table is fine. Windows sees two partitions, the second one is "Windows HD". It's correctly selected in the "boot.ini". Also added again in Recovery Console with bootcfg. Had a new boot sector written with fixboot. Chkdsk found an error (not more info) but only with p option.

What could be the problem here? What other magic (I didn't do with gdisk) could BC Assistant be doing apart from installing a MBR for the Windows partition? Can I be reasonably sure that fixmbr won't damage my partition table (complains about "non-standard or invalid boot record" as it's probably not familiar with that hybrid thing)?

Fixmbr won't actually damage your partition table. It only touches the MBR and not the GPT. In my experience, what you're seeing is not a MBR problem but a restore problem. What happened the last time I saw this was that when the partition was resized in the restore, the bootloader file was not on the right spot on the disk (the nth entry in the root directory). The solution to that was to get a Norton Ghost trial, and on another (Windows) computer make a backup and a restore of the Windows partition (via a USB bridge for the HDD).

The thing is, generally the MBR code will give an error if no active partition is found. If one is found, no message is displayed but the active partition boot code gets executed. That code has to fit in less than 512 bytes and chainload ntldr or bootldr depending on your OS. As you might imagine in 512 bytes you don't have room for error messages and to correctly interpret NTFS in order to find the file regardless where it is on the partition so they hack around it and put the booloader file always in the same place. A defrag application or partition resize app that doesn't know not to touch that file will mess it up and make that partition unbootable.

As an experiment, put that hdd in another system (not Mac) and attempt booting from it. If it works, you should get to a blue screen, but anyway at least pass the part with the bootloader menu.

The fix with Ghost is kinda lame, but it's know working. Give it a shot.

Cheers,

R.

d3vi1, herzlichen Dank für deine Erklärung und Tipps!

The drive image I'm trying to restore is indeed from a smaller partition. I did a backup/restore now from Boot Camp partition using Parallels/W7/Ghost (trying to avoid taking the MBP apart and finding a Windows machine; I realize it's not equivalent but wanted to give it a shot). Unfortunately, at the end of the restore, Parallels (or rather OS X) denied Ghost overwriting the MBR of the physical drive. Result: boot still fails, stopping at blinking cursor.

Then I remembered, when I had to restore the same kind of drive image to a new partition of different size (i.e. larger) some years ago, it only worked after a fresh XP install (with NTFS quick format) on that partition in advance. Doing that now made the partition show up on alt-boot again, but bootup now fails with the infamous "hal.dll missing" error. Sure enough, hal.dll and boot.ini are in place and the entries are correct. The usual fixes didn't help. I manually deleted boot.ini and recreated it with bootcfg and suppose that program should know to place the file as the correct entry in the root directory (fixboot'ed too).

So now my problem boils down to that I can't even get a fresh XP SP2 install to boot from that partition (btw, same thing if I try to boot from it in Parallels). That with the partition table looking OK (see my last post; can't risk to repartition again as this is my work system and deadlines are coming up) and boot.ini supposedly in the right spot.

Any further ideas why the bootloader struggles with this partition scheme?

You CAN install lion with bootcamp partition.

Go to your disk utilities.

Select your bootcamp partition.

Select "unmount"

install lion.

Read, search. Very usefull tools on the internet and in forums.

Good Luck.