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Trouble selecting startup disk

honeycombz

honeycombz

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 6, 2013
588
154
Ever since installing bootcamp I seem to be having a hard time selecting my main boot disk. I have 2 disks with Mac OS on them, and then bootcamp. I have to option boot every time. The boot disk is set in system preferences correctly. I have reset PRAM, option and then ctrl boot the disk I want booting, but on restart it always reverts back to the other Mac OS disk I don’t want booting unless I option boot everytime. Any ideas how I can resolve this?
 
Clicking restart in the startup disk preferences window doesn’t make a difference.
 
Ok, well this may be part of the problem. On -liststartupdisks it doesn’t even list the disk I am currently booted into? WTH!
 
Install EasyUEFI Free in Windows and look for the boot entries there. If it is listed there you can use the green arrows to set the boot preference. Whatever OS you want default, move it to the top.

Also I recommend doing a fresh backup of anything important to you. With some of these tools if you screw up some bad things can happen.
 
What a pain. Maybe I should just delete bootcamp or put it on a drive I can disconnect or something. If I type diskutil list I can see the drive. I'll check out EasyUEFI Free. A bit apprehensive to mess with things via Windows but I will take a look.
 
I understand.

Actually what I'd really do is just install rEFInd. It is way better than holding down ALT and way better than selecting an OS from within an OS. So even if nothing was broken at all, that's what I'd do anyway just for the vast improvement.

It is also highly configurable and can be themed to look quite nice. Here is an example minimalist theme for what your bootscreen could look like.

687474703a2f2f692e696d67626f782e636f6d2f346773734c6453492e706e67.png

Keep in mind that this would be automatic and quick, not like the Mac Boot Loader that requires you to hold ALT/OPTION and then takes forever.
 
Is rEFInd safe? Or is it heavily customizing stuff so that I run the risk of destroying my entire system?
 
honeycombz said:
Is rEFInd safe? Or is it heavily customizing stuff so that I run the risk of destroying my entire system?
Click to expand...

It is fairly safe because it is not doing anything exotic. The installer essentially just copies some files to the EFI boot partition of OS X and then sets itself as the default bootup choice. If you ever mess up its configuration so bad that it is in an unusable state, which seems extremely unlikely, you can just boot up next time with ALT/OPTION and you can boot to something else instead.

Of course you don't have to configure it at all. The default configuration file is fine. Configuration is about setting preferences, so it is completely optional.

But if you are like me eventually you'll want to do things like hide all the boot choices you don't normally care about, then later you'll want a cool background, then some day you'll find yourself either theming it or assigning custom icons for each of your operating systems.
 
I should also mention that the boot disk I want to run is running off of the Velocity Solo X1. Is it possible that Bootcamp would have auto installed some driver or firmware related to that card? Is there a way to check the firmware version of a PCI card? I don't understand why everything would have been running fine, that all of a sudden with the introduction of Bootcamp now I have this startup disk problem.
 
honeycombz said:
I should also mention that the boot disk I want to run is running off of the Velocity Solo X1. Is it possible that Bootcamp would have auto installed some driver or firmware related to that card? Is there a way to check the firmware version of a PCI card? I don't understand why everything would have been running fine, that all of a sudden with the introduction of Bootcamp now I have this startup disk problem.
Click to expand...

Any progress here?

Also just a thought out of curiosity: What if you used Parallels instead of Bootcamp?
 
I’ve been using VMWare for years. Works fine for basic stuff but for gaming and other things no way. And yes, there has been progress. I deleted my entire Win 7 build and started over with Win 8,1 and the entire boot issue went away. Currently I haven’t reinstalled Bootcamp support again or downloaded drivers yet, haven’t had the time but soon. I will probably just stick with the Bootcamp 4.0.33 or whatever the 3,1 version is rather than try out Bootcamp 5 since that isn’t technically supported on a 3,1... unless someone here suggest otherwise.
 
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