Two Windows Drives With BootCamp

[FranzyPants]

I installed Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit the other day on my MacPro. I use a 1TB drive as my primary drive and Mac OSX boot drive. This 1TB drive is in bay 1. I also have a 500GB drive in bay 2 that I installed Windows Vista on. When I hold down the option key when I boot my Mac to choose to boot up Windows instead of Mac OSX, I see three drives that I can boot. Mac OSX, and two Windows drives. Booting the middle Windows drive just brings up a black screen that says "GRUB" on the top left with a blinking underscore. Booting the last Windows drive boots up Vista.

Is there anyway to remove that middle Windows drive from my BootCamp screen? This wouldn't be an issue if my Mac didn't default to booting that middle drive when I want Windows, but since it does I'd like to remove that middle drive if possible.

 

[balamw]

I haven't used it myself, but your machine seems like a good candidate for refit http://refit.sourceforge.net/ as an alternative bootloader with more customization ability.

GRUB is typically a Linux bootloader so it it just leftovers from a long gone Linux install? (I say typically, because I have a Windows only friend that uses it to go between different WIndows OSes).

B

 

[FranzyPants]

That makes sense. I did install Ubuntu a while ago. But it doesn't make sense that the caption for that drive says "Windows" instead of "Ubuntu". I was wondering if maybe that middle Windows drive was some sort of restore partition created by Vista. Either way, I'll try refit and If something goes wrong I can just reinstall since I haven't added much to Vista yet.

Thanks.

 

[balamw]

That makes sense. I did install Ubuntu a while ago. But it doesn't make sense that the caption for that drive says "Windows" instead of "Ubuntu". I was wondering if maybe that middle Windows drive was some sort of restore partition created by Vista. Either way, I'll try refit and If something goes wrong I can just reinstall since I haven't added much to Vista yet.

Thanks.

The Mac's boot loader labels anything other than Mac OS as "Windows" (which I think is a pejorative term for "Legacy OS" ), which is why those who triple boot and beyond tend to use refit. Your GRUB is probably a leftover from your ubuntu install and may just live in the boot sector.

B

 

[FranzyPants]

refit identified the leftover linux boot loader but i'm not sure how to delete it. There doesn't seem to be an option to delete from the refit screen. Any ideas?

 

[balamw]

refit identified the leftover linux boot loader but i'm not sure how to delete it. There doesn't seem to be an option to delete from the refit screen. Any ideas?

Sorry, no. Hopefully someone with more refit and/or GRUB experience can chime in. I only ever used lilo in my linux days.

I presume your GRUB is on one of the HDDs you use for Windows so you could just try booting from a Windows DVD to Recovery Console and run fixmbr from there, but it could potentially write to the wrong place so be careful...

B

 

[FranzyPants]

ok, thanks for your help!