[smsgator]

Unmountable_Boot_Volume error when installing XP after Snow Leopard

I boot the Mini10V from a Snow Leopard DVD USB stick that was made with the retail Snow Leopard DVD and made bootable using NetBookBootMaker.

I install Snow Leopard on a 100MB partition on a GUID partitioned 250GB drive and run NetbookInstaller 0.8.3 RC3 (It’s GUID because Snow Leopard won’t let you install to an MBR partitioned drive, but I'd b happy to install to an MBR partitioned drive if there was a way).

The system boots to Snow Leopard, without the Snow Leopard DVD USB stick plugged in, just fine.

I install XP to a second partition (100GB NTFS) using the XP CD that came with the Mini10V. The install formats the FAT32 to NTFS, copies over the files then hangs every time with an “an unmountable boot volume error.

So here's the questions:

1. I created a 100GB FAT32 partition during the initial disk partitioning during the installation of Snow Leopard. Was this the wrong thing to do?

2. Should I have installed Snow Leopard without creating that partition (just allocate free space) and then have created the FAT32 partition after Snow Leopard was booting on its own?

3. Should I have installed Snow Leopard without creating that FAT32 partition and instead have let XP create an NTFS partition in the free space during XP installation rather than letting XP format the FAT32 partition (created during the initial GUID partitioning when I installed Snow Leopard) to NTFS.

4. Is there something else I should or should not be doing? I've been installing the Snow Leopard 10.6.1 update right after Snow Leopard is fully installed.

I'm trying 2 & 3 now, but each install of Snow Leopard takes about 1.5 hours (no matter how long OSX says it will take!). I've been trying to do this dual boot for two days now, without much sleep in between the days.

[smsgator]

Originally Posted by smsgator

Unmountable_Boot_Volume error when installing XP after Snow Leopard

I boot the Mini10V from a Snow Leopard DVD USB stick that was made with the retail Snow Leopard DVD and made bootable using NetBookBootMaker.

I install Snow Leopard on a 100MB partition on a GUID partitioned 250GB drive and run NetbookInstaller 0.8.3 RC3 (It’s GUID because Snow Leopard won’t let you install to an MBR partitioned drive, but I'd b happy to install to an MBR partitioned drive if there was a way).

The system boots to Snow Leopard, without the Snow Leopard DVD USB stick plugged in, just fine.

I install XP to a second partition (100GB NTFS) using the XP CD that came with the Mini10V. The install formats the FAT32 to NTFS, copies over the files then hangs every time with an “an unmountable boot volume error.

So here's the questions:

1. I created a 100GB FAT32 partition during the initial disk partitioning during the installation of Snow Leopard. Was this the wrong thing to do?

2. Should I have installed Snow Leopard without creating that partition (just allocate free space) and then have created the FAT32 partition after Snow Leopard was booting on its own?

3. Should I have installed Snow Leopard without creating that FAT32 partition and instead have let XP create an NTFS partition in the free space during XP installation rather than letting XP format the FAT32 partition (created during the initial GUID partitioning when I installed Snow Leopard) to NTFS.

4. Is there something else I should or should not be doing? I've been installing the Snow Leopard 10.6.1 update right after Snow Leopard is fully installed.

I'm trying 2 & 3 now, but each install of Snow Leopard takes about 1.5 hours (no matter how long OSX says it will take!). I've been trying to do this dual boot for two days now, without much sleep in between the days.

Well for attempt number 37 I did not create a partition for XP at Snow Leopard Installation; I created the partition after Snow Leopard was completely installed and booting from the hard drive.

I also was leaving some free space on the drive for a future Linux installation, and OSX's Disk Utility for some reason insisted that the free space be between OSX and XP rather than after both OSes like I had tried in one of the previous attempts. I didn't think anything of it, but then I recall reading somewhere that XP wants to be the fourth partition, not the third as it had been in my previous installations

When I would partition the drive at Snow Leopard install the partitions were OSX, XP, and free space, now they are OSX, free space, and XP.

So the reason it's now working is either:

a) XP is in the 4th partition rather than the 3rd partition (but surely someone would have seen this sort of problem in the past and I could find no record of it with the Mini10V.

or

b) the XP partition was created after OSX was installed (and after NetbookInstaller was run), rather than at the same time OSX was installing (and before NetbookInstaller was run).

The next hurdle was that I didn't understand that after all this was done and I booted up from the Snow Leopard USB stick, is that you don't boot into Snow Leopard on the hard drive to run Netbook Installer, but that you have to run Netbook Installar from a boot to the USB stick.

At least I was able to accomplish all this without having a Mac. I had to boot the Snow Leopard DVD using Netbook CD and install OSX and download NetbookBootMaker and create the image and boot code on the USB drive.


And to think that I thought that the hard part of all this was going to be the 2GB upgrade of the RAM and hard drive--which took me only about 90 minutes.