There are a bunch of guides out there on how to dual boot Vista and OS X on your PC. While I have listed the general steps that I followed below, this post is intended to be a troubleshooting guide for some of the weird problems you can run into while trying to do this.

hfs+ partition error on boot
This usually means that you have a problem with your master boot record (MBR) or the partition id is unrecognizable to the loader. To fix this:

1. boot the Mac OS Installer DVD
2. from the Utilities menu, open a terminal
3. from the terminal run
   fdisk /dev/rdisk0 (or whatever device you are using)
4. look for your OS X partition. If the id for it is not ‘AF’ then setting it to AF should fix your problem. This is concerning though because Apple’s Disk Utility should set this properly.
5. if the id is AF then you can rebuild your MBR by quitting fdisk and running
   fdisk -u /dev/rdisk0

b0 error on boot
This is usually caused by the OSX partition not being marked as active. To fix this:

1. boot the MAC OS Installer DVD and open a terminal from the Utilities menu
2. launch fdisk with
   fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0 (or appropriate device)
3. press p and enter to see a list of partitions
4. find your Mac OSX partition in the list
5. type f to make it active. For example if the partition you want to make active is number 1, type:
   f 1
6. enter the command:
   write to commit the changes
7. on reboot, things work.

Windows fails to boot, claiming \Windows\system32\winload.exe is missing or corrupted
There are a number of things that can cause this. Fortunately this is really easy to fix. Just pop in your Vista DVD and run through the automated recovery to have it rebuild your \boot\BCD and update the MBR. Note that this requires that your Vista partition be flagged as bootable.

Vista DVD is unable to find any installations of Windows to restore or when you try and install Vista it gives you the error “Windows is unable to find a System Volume that meets its criteria for installation” or when you are manually using bcdedit to fix your mbr it tells you it cannot write to the disk
As unintuitive as it sounds, this is usually caused by the Vista partition not being flagged as bootable. To fix this, follow the steps for making a partition active from the b0 error on boot instructions, except use the id of your Vista partition instead of your OSX partition.

You have both operating systems installed and can boot Vista but EasyBCD does not have the auto-configure Mac device option that you are looking for
The fix for this is to not use EasyBCD for this. I find this to be an unnecessary complication. Instead, simply copy the Darwin x86 bootsector (known as chain0) tor you local hard drive and use bcdedit to make Vista’s boot loader load Vista:

1. Copy chain0 to c:\ (or the root of whichever drive Vista is installed on)
2. from an elevanted command prompt do the following:
   bcdedit /copy {current} /d “Mac OS X”
bcdedit /enum active this will display your active partitions Find the one labelled “Mac OS X”. Under it you’ll see a line titled “identifier” followed by a GUID sorrounded by {} chars. Copy that id
   bcdedit /set {IdYouCopied} PATH \chain0
3. Reboot, you’ll see Mac OS X listed as an option. Select it. Then it will give 5 seconds to press a key to go into advanced options. Press any key. You’ll then see a list of all your partitions. Select the Mac partition and you should be good to go.

Steps I took to get my dual boot install working:

1. I used the Disk Management snap-in to the Computer Management Console to shrink my Vista partition. This left me with a 30 GB Vista partition and a bunch of unpartitioned space. Using the same tool I created another 30 GB Partition.
2. I booted the Mac Installer from a PC-bootable Mac DVD, used the Disk Partition utility to format the new partition with HFS+ (with journaling) and installed Mac on my box
3. Installer finished, rebooted my machine and gave me HFS+ error
4. I Rebooted the Mac Installer to fix that (this step is not necessary)
   Made the Vista Partition bootable and rebooted to see that Vista’s boot loader can’t find winload.exe. Used a Vista DVD to fix this
5. booted Vista and copied chain0 to my root (c:\)
6. used bcdedit to add an entry to the Vista Boot loader to boot Mac

Feel free to post any problems you have. Maybe somebody can answer them. :)

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