No option to boot into windows

I thought I finally had everything working but today I noticed that I can no longer boot into windows. The partition is still there and formatted correctly but it wont give me the option to boot from it at start-up and it's not recognized in the start-up disk manager.


I should not that getting XP to install correctly was a bit of a challenge as I wanted to have 4 mac partitions and the 1 windows. I finally managed to do it and had bootcamp as the 3rd partition. My guess is the issue came in when I used carbon copy cloner to put the back-up of my old system (10.4.11) onto one of the mac partitions (so I have 10.6.8 on one partition and 10.4.11 on another) or when I created the last 2 partitions after installed windows. The bootcamp partition is still in the 3rd spot so I'm not sure what to do. I tried removing the last 2 partitions I had made but to no avail. I will try a repair of XP when I get home but I thought I would pool the masses to see if anyone has any thoughts on this.


My guess is that when I put my old system onto the partition it somehow replaced the bootcamp start-up option, so I'm hoping a repair of XP will fix it. Does this make sense?


I can provide the refit information if that helps at all.




Thank you everyone for your help!


Geoff

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Bootcamp requires the drive be in a single partition and sounds like using a third partition has caused the problem. When booted from Snow Leopard does XP partition appear in System Preferences > Startup Disk?

Thank you for the reply harry. You are right that bootcamp requires a single partition in order for the assistant to run. However, once it creates the windows partition you can then modify things and play around a bit. It takes some tinkering but you can successfully have multiple mac partitions with a working bootcamp installation as long as you keep the bootcamp partition in the top 3. If anyone needs help with this, just do some searching online and there are a number of guides that can help you. Otherwise drop me a line and I'd be happy to run you through the method I used.

I was able to get the problem fixed last night and thought I would post the solution in case other people are having the same issue. The best thing I can figure out is when I cloned my old drive onto the partition it somehow replaced the boot information for the bootcamp partition I had created. I had no option or way to boot into the windows partition as it didn't show up in the start-up disk manager or when I held down "option" upon start-up.

I was able to get windows back as a start-up option though by installing rEFIt (rEFIt - An EFI Boot Menu and Toolkit) This program detects any bootable partition and gives you the option to boot from it. It replaces the need to press option every time to select which OS to boot and puts in it's own menu system. Anyway once I tried to boot from windows it gave me an NTLDR error which confirmed my suspicion about the replaced boot information. So I did a repair and recopied over the boot files again but it still didn't want to boot. I assumed that for some reason, as it is Windows after all, the installation had corrupted so I did a fresh install. Everything is now up and running with 1 windows partition and 4 mac partitions with 3 start-up options, 10.6, 10.4 and XP.