Polish dancers never had this trouble
Oooh look streaks of white on a black background, nice. Well there’s more than meets the eye Mr Squiggles, if you click on it and choose “All Sizes” and go for the biggest you’ll notice its text!…you may have to squint a bit. So what is it?
Yesterday in Windows Vista, after failing miserably to get Oblivion to play in a lower resolution (changing the res settings manually in it’s config file just caused it to crash), and then discovering that Roller-coaster Tycoon doesn’t work at all… I think that’s something to do with the disks copy protection, I decided I want my XP back! But I figured that if I went straight ahead and installed XP I might screw things up even further if I don’t first restore the EFI partition I destroyed in order to trick Vista into working.
I think I’ve broken my mac 
Haha. This is what I think is the background, technically, I might not be entirely accurate here. The iMac Core Duo uses a new EFI architecture, devised by intel to replace the now prehistoric BIOS based system (this being the way software learns about the hardware). EFI also brought with it a new way to map the partitions on the hard drive. The old method was to store the partition info in an MBR (Master Boot Record), the newer way is to use a “GUID Partition Map”, which is more flexible and isn’t limited to just 4 Primary Partitions.
I think… when installing boot camp an MBR was created, mirroring the information in the GUID Partition Map, so you ended up with both, the GUID one for mac os x and an MBR for windows to understand. Thing is, what I’ve ended up doing, when I deleted the EFI Partition using the vista installer it only updated the MBR, ignoring the GUID map. Now the GUID map is out of sync with reality, it no longer matches how the partitions actually are. But, when Mac OS X boots it is being kind to me, it’s noticing that the GUID Partition map is out of date and defaulting to the MBR instead. So it does still boot. But I cannot recreate the EFI partition, because the tools which are able to do that only work with the GUID map. Oops The tool I need to use is “gpt” and as you can see from the photo it says map is “bogus” and I don’t think it means that in a bill and ted manor.
Luckily I went ahead and installed XP back over the top of Vista (after backing up my important stuff) and it worked fine. I’m just a bit fucked if that EFI Partition is needed.
Btw, to get to a position where I can use the GPT command is rather tricky. You have to stick the OS X install dvd in, hold option at the boot chime so that I get to the boot camp menu and then press “Command+s” whilst at the same time clicking on the dvd. All that because the only way for the HD not to be locked from gpt is to boot the install dvd in single-user mode. Crazy.
If I had my bigger backup drive, the 250GB one, which I still haven’t got around to sending back to hitachi I could backup everything and then completely erase my mac’s HD. But I only have a 60GB HD to backup to at the moment and it isn’t big enough for everything. I have to be selective.
Damn Hitachi’s packaging requirements.
