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Black screen if booting Windows or from Windows Install DVD

Hi,


I had a working Windows 7 x64 Pro Boot Camp setup until recently. Now, when I attempt to boot from the Statup Manager, I can select the Windows partition but it simply sits at a black screen indefinitely. I attempted to set the Windows partition as the Startup Disk from the System Preferences, but it doesn't appear. I've attempted to boot from the Windows 7 Installation DVD in order to perform a Windows Startup Repair, but that black screens in the same manner as the Windows partition.


Here's the result of sudo gpt -r -vv show disk3 on the relevant disk:


gpt show: disk3: mediasize=500107862016; sectorsize=512; blocks=976773168

gpt show: disk3: Suspicious MBR at sector 0

gpt show: disk3: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: disk3: Sec GPT at sector 976773167

start size index contents

0 1 MBR

1 1 Pri GPT header

2 32 Pri GPT table

34 6

40 409600 1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B

409640 156303528 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

156713168 1269536

157982704 659841040 3 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

817823744 262144

818085888 158687232 4 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

976773120 15

976773135 32 Sec GPT table

976773167 1 Sec GPT header


Here's the result of sudo fdisk /dev/disk3 on the relevant disk:


Disk: /dev/disk3geometry: 60801/255/63 [976773168 sectors]

Signature: 0xAA55

Starting Ending

#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1: EE 0 0 2 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 818085887] <Unknown ID>

*2: 07 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 818085888 - 158687232] HPFS/QNX/AUX

3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused


So far as I can tell, this means my hybrid MBR setup is intact, but I could be wrong. I should point out that this drive doesn't actually contain a bootable OS X partition, which exists on a completely separate drive and boots just fine.


Anyone able to assist?

Mac mini (Mid 2011), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), 256GB SSD, 500GB HDD, 8GB RAM

Posted on Sep 13, 2013 6:52 AM

Reply
10 replies

Sep 16, 2013 7:00 AM in response to Scotch_Brawth

It might be worth seeing if rEFInd can help find the various parts of the Windows bootloader to get this to work. Otherwise it's exploratory sugergy to find out what's going on. The Apple CSM-BIOS isn't configurable, so it might be blindly loading the first available Windows bootloader it comes across instead of the one for the drive that contains the bootable Windows installation - i.e. if the external ever had a Windows install attempt onto it, it'll have a bootloader, even if the install never worked or you reformat it. Two Windows bootloaders will cause such problems. If there's no possibilty of two drives containing two bootloaders then it's some other confusion or corruption either at the bootloader level or maybe even NVRAM.

Sep 16, 2013 4:47 PM in response to Scotch_Brawth

Following advice from a thread on MacRumors, I unplugged everything except the keyboard, mouse and monitor and Windows booted fine. So, it must be a hardware incompatibility issue. I'll figure out exactly which device is responsible tomorrow.


Thanks for the additional replies. For anyone who's interested, I'll post the device responsible once I've figured it out.

Black screen if booting Windows or from Windows Install DVD

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