A concession

[clay]

Congratulations narf and blanka! Even if there are some minor issues with your solution, I'm sure you will sort them out in time and win the prize.

After spending a few long nights on this problem, I thought I'd share my code with the community, in case there's anything here that might be of value:

http://daemons.net/~clay/index.php/2006/03/15/dual-booting-windows-xp-and-mac-os-x-on-intel-macs/

I'd also just like to say how fun and challenging this contest was. Thanks for setting it up, Colin.

What's the next challenge? :)

Cheers,

Clay

[lcninja]

So cool.. Who knows maybe it will even be a missing piece of a future puzzle. Thanks for opening it up!

[LonV]

How did you/do you plan on handling the Dual Boot portion of the contest?

Great work, btw, and keep plugging, you never know narf might not meet the requirements of the contest.

--Lon

[sud0n1m]

Clay, thanks for the message, and thanks for sharing the code. The goal with this project is to open up the solution to further refine it after its done. I would like to look at creating a project in sourceforge. Im sure that there is a lot everyone can learn from the various solutions people came up with.

[blanka]

I agree. I will also release the source code as soon as I clean up a few extra things that are bothering me.

Clay, hats off to you, man. Your solution and ours are strikingly similar. Except the "remote debugging by pictures"... whew... that's extreme!

[LonV]

I'm as giddy as a school girl about getting a solution!

You guys win my daily "You're the smartest person I know" award! :)

--Lon

[koltz]

Thanks for the update and sorry you didn't quite make it. But in the long run, we should have a great working solution. Now on a multiboot menu, I would love to see it graphical, since we know the Mac has the Apple logo at boot, Narf's solution has the Windows logo pop up, we could get the Pengiun to pop up. Kind of like the dock on the bottom, move between the three to choose and it makes it bigger :) Now that is Mac like.

Corey

[clay]

Several folks have asked about dual booting. I used the technique described at http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/Dual_Booting to create a small HFS+ boot volume that shows up in the graphical EFI boot volume chooser that you get by holding down option while powering on your Mac.

I split my disk into three partitions:

- One large HFS+ volume for Mac OS X
- One tiny HFS+ volume (I think I used 128 MB) for my boot loader
- One large FAT32 volume for Windows XP (the Windows installer will format it as NTFS later)

On the tiny HFS+ volume, which I called /Volumes/OSXP, I made a folder called /efi and stuck my boot loader in there, then blessed the volume like so:

sudo bless --folder /Volumes/OSXP/efi --file /Volumes/OSXP/efi/OSXP.efi

By default, the machine still boots into Mac OS X, but by holding down the option key when powering on your Mac you get a graphical menu that looks something like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cwaidoh/113186068/

This technique will most likely also work with narf's/blanka's solution.

[MulletMan13]

That's awesome Clay, thanks a lot for sharing that stuff :)

It's exciting to see things come out of the grain now that the contest has ended, it's just a shame that the other guys that were so close get nothing :(

Keep up the great work!

[chrisbw]

FYI, if you want to see the "remote debugging by pictures" that Clay and I did, I made them public on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/extraspecial/sets/72057594074203534/

I'm pleased to announce that my MacBook Pro was not harmed in any way during this process, other than one scary incident with the partition table (that luckily we recovered pretty quickly).

Congrats Narf, but I must say I'm disappointed, since Clay was going to buy me a new lens I've been drooling over if he won ;)

[AudioDan]

Alright, I got the next challenge, who can dual boot on PPC chips! They are the most commonly owned and everyone has em'!