I used the Boot Camp Assistant app on Mac OS 10.6.4 to create another partition. Then I erased the partition with Disk Utility instead of using Boot Camp Assistant to erase it.
Now rEFIt gives me the option to boot Max OS X, but also an option to "Boot Legacy OS from HD". What is it referring to?
My computer has only one physical drive and is setup the default way when doing a fresh install of Snow Leopard.
/dev/disk0
/dev/disk0 — GUID_partition_scheme
/dev/disk0s1 — EFI
/dev/disk0s2 — Apple_HFS Macintosh HD
After removing the Boot Camp partition with Disk Utility, I thought that it might not have removed some sort of boot info from the drive because I didn't use Boot Camp Assistant, so I used Boot Camp Assistant again to recreate a partition and then used it to remove the partition.
I blessed Mac OS X and rebooted and then re-blessed rEFIt.
Still no dice. Any idea as to a solution? If I do a backup and then reformat, will the problem still exist because of a file that I restore afterwards? I don't want to do that just to see if it will work–I'd rather know via some existing documentation before taking that step.
Thanks in advance.
Best Answer
Warning: Please be sure you have a good idea of what exactly is happening before following any advice that I write here. This may be risky! Please do a bit more Googling before pressing ENTER on a Linux terminal. :)
I had this same problem after I removed a partition containing Windows 7 using Disk Utility. The problem in my case was that the Windows 7 partition was removed, but the Windows boot loader installed on the Master Boot Record (often denoted MBR) remained. To remove it, use dd as in the example below.
EXAMPLE: If your Windows boot loader is installed on the MBR of your sda drive, from a Linux terminal run: (WARNING, DON'T BLINDLY TYPE THIS WITHOUT READING THE DESCRIPTION ABOVE:) sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=440 count=1
The dd command is also helpful if you have an extra GRUB boot loader installed somewhere. For example, I mistakenly installed a GRUB boot loader on my second hard drive both in the second hard drive's MBR and in the second hard drive's first partition. rEFIt listed both of the boot loaders, even though only the one installed on the second hard drive's MBR worked. So to remove the extra GRUB boot loader on the first partition of the second drive I also used dd as below.
EXAMPLE 2: If you have an extra GRUB boot loader installed on a partition, in this example partition sdb1, from a Linux terminal run dd as in the example below. (Notice the "of=..." changed and the "bs=..." changed from the first example.) (WARNING, DON'T BLINDLY TYPE THIS WITHOUT READING THE DESCRIPTION ABOVE:) sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb1 bs=446 count=1
I know this is an old question, but it was never really answered. I hope this helps many people who were led to this page while searching for this problem. God bless!