Multiboot, Partition Tables, and NVRAM

firelizzard

Registered
I am a tinkerer, but I still like a functional mac. I currently have Snow Leopard, Windows 7, and Linux Mint on my internal HD and I am using rEFIt to multiboot. I have rEFIt (and a currently disabled GRUB) on a separate boot partition, but I would like to use the hidden EFI partition to boot from. I know that deleting this partition will break firmware updates, but will re-formatting it do so? Though, I don't actually want to reformat it. I mounted this partition using 'sudo -i; mkdir /Volumes/EFI; mount_msdos /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/EFI' and copied rEFIt into the EFI folder and archived the original (and deleted the folder, so I could not boot from the original boot partition) and then ran 'bless --folder /Volumes/EFI/EFI/refit --file /Volumes/EFI/EFI/refit/refit.efi --labelfile /Volumes/EFI/EFI/refit/refit.vollabel --setBoot'. When I boot up, after entering the firmware password (which I have set up to full security), it just hangs, I assume because nothing is updating the screen buffer. However, when I held down option on boot, rEFIt appeared, and I could boot. So, how do I get my system booting off of refit.efi in the EFI hidden partition? And how do I make rEFIt show up in Startup Disk/what determines if something shows up there?

One last thing. How can I edit the MBR table without changing the GPT table or the actual partition scheme. I want more than three partitions to appear in Windows, but the OS partitions + the EFI partitions take up all four slots. So I was thinking I would somehow write the MBR table so that Windows thought the Snow Leopard or Linux Mint partition was an extended/logical partition.
 
Back
Top