Dual Booting Mac and Windows+Accessing BIOS

Hey guys

I can't seem to access the BIOS of Windows when I load it up on my MacBook. Is there any way that I can create a menu, so that after I select Windows XP after holding alt on startup, I'm brought to a new Window that has 3 options:

Windows XP (boots regular XP)
Windows XP Safe Mode (brings me to the safe mode selection screen)
Windows XP BIOS (brings me to the BIOS)

And a timeout of like 10 seconds, after which, the first will be selected? I think it would have something to do with boot.ini, but I don't know exactly.

Thanks for any help!

the bios is apart of the actual machine. Macs use EFI, i think.

ummm okay, so hw do i go about changing the order of boot devices? i.e. set an external hdd to boot first, then my internal?

cheers for the reply

I don't know about changing the boot sequence, but you can use the utility installed with your Mac Drivers Disc called "Startup Disk" that is under the Control Panel to select "Target Disk" mode, allowing you to boot from an external disk.

Yeah I'm afraid what you're asking for is not possible. The Mac does not have a "BIOS" that you can access the way you can with a PC, and you cannot boot a Windows installation on an external drive via Boot Camp.

need help on read and write permission...

hey guys...

sorry to disturb all of you and i am new to mac world.

im having problem in read and write permission on windows hardisk. As all of you can see that when we run our mac os, we can see 2 hardisk on our desktop that is macintosh hardisk and also untitled (windows hardisk). The problem is that i cant write files on my windows hardisk. i can only read files from it. so, can i just change that so that i can read and write on untitled (window hardisk)?

please help me in this.....thank you...


p/s : mine is intel imac 20" ,tiger 10.4.11

hey hows it going?

i think the reason your having your problem is because the windows hard drive is formatted using the wrong file system. did you format it using ntfs? i think it has to be formatted to fat32 before mac can write to it.

you'll probably have to back up everything on your windows drive, then perform a reinstall of windows, this time selecting fat32 as the file system.

i hope this helps!

Happy Christmas!

try this link for NTFS

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/li...write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.html

To the Op if you want to access bios at the beginning of start up on pc after booting into it press f2 and it gives you a selection thats from within wndows right at the start.

read and write problem

o ok..thx a lot guys...it helps...but i must reformat my window hardisk then...huhu.....ok.....i have to backup my work on my external hardisk...hehe...thx...

merry christmas to u too....2eXtreme

Nah, according to the helpful link posted by louishen, you don't have to reformat. You just need to install the macfuse extension (I haven't read the full details, but I am assuming this is a kernel module allowing full write access to NTFS partitions).

Another alternative is to install a VM product such as parallels or fusion. You can then fire up your Boot Camp installation in a MacOS Window and write files to it that way (you can drag and drop files between the Finder and Windows Explorer, you can also mount your Mac's HFS partitions as a drive inside of Windows, and I believe you can also write to your Windows partition using the Finder if you have Parallels installed--I don't know if Fusion supports this yet). Frankly I find this far preferable to booting straight into Windows. The only time I boot into Windows directly is when I need to run a game.

Macfuse is free, Parallels/Fusion will run you between $60-80 depending on specials, but gives you a lot of flexibility.

hi djames42... i already download macFUSE dmg file and already installed it on my mac...but it said i have to change something inside terminal...is that correct?

Apparently. I haven't installed this myself, simply because I haven't really needed write-access to my Boot Camp partition enough. It looks like you have to create a symlink (which, roughly speaking, is the Unix equivalent of a Windows shortcut, the difference being that a shortcut in Windows is a very broken way of pointing to something, unlike a symlink). You then have to create an empty directory, and then mount your Windows partition onto that empty directory.

I'm going to guess that you would have to mount the filesystem every time you reboot your Mac.

There are some bad things you can do inside of the Terminal, especially in conjunction with the sudo command. However, none of these posted steps are going to break anything.

You can also use Paragons' NTFS for Mac OS X. Several of us here were beta testers for this product and is working very well for full access to your NTFS drives.

problem in formatting windows space hardisk

hello all...happy new year...

sori but....it seems that i have problems again regarding my windows partition hardisk....it seems that i when i want to use my boot camp beta 1.4 it says that it has expired.....when i checked the solution on apple's website..it says that i have to upgrade my mac tiger to leopard for the further use of boot camp....is there any other alternatives other than upgrading my tiger to leopard?

pikori said:

sori but....it seems that i have problems again regarding my windows partition hardisk....it seems that i when i want to use my boot camp beta 1.4 it says that it has expired.....when i checked the solution on apple's website..it says that i have to upgrade my mac tiger to leopard for the further use of boot camp....is there any other alternatives other than upgrading my tiger to leopard?

Click to expand...

You can still use your boot camp partition, you just can't use the utility to create and delete partitions and to create drivers disks.

If you absolutely must run the boot camp utility, you might try changing the date on your computer to last year. I suspect that once the utility detects that it is past the beta period however, it probably renders it useless to this cheat.

djames42 said:

You can still use your boot camp partition, you just can't use the utility to create and delete partitions and to create drivers disks.

If you absolutely must run the boot camp utility, you might try changing the date on your computer to last year. I suspect that once the utility detects that it is past the beta period however, it probably renders it useless to this cheat.

Click to expand...

Or simply use rEFIt. It's a simple yet great tool.

smartyMAC said:

Or simply use rEFIt. It's a simple yet great tool.

Click to expand...

Am I missing something? I'm not familiar with this tool, but it looks like nothing more than a bootloader with a (very) pretty face.

Yes it's a bootloader with pretty face and little more common sense than bootcamp. Not to forget BC is also a bootloader and disk partitioning utility and needs license...rEFIt doesn't